Explanation

The purpose of this page is to explain our intentions and to clarify involved licenses. Free on this page does not concern price but freedom. Briefly stated, we want to free information as much as possible:

• In the spirit of the General Public License for software. See http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

• Creative Commons Share Alike and Attribute for documentation. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

However, this is not always possible. In order to explain this, here are some details:

• Traffic signs are in the public domain by default - not copyrighted and not GPL-ed.

• Some organizations simply demand copyrighted versions of software in order to be able to integrate and redistribute it with other software in their environment - mixing free and proprietary software in a distribution can be a problem. This is explained here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLInProprietarySystem.

  • This is one of the reasons why NedCAD is the copyright holder and contributing coders wave their rights.

• Free software from third parties is used but may have different licenses, for example ImageMagick is compatible with GPL3 but differs.

• Despite intentions, there are practical issues. In a non free environment such as the CAD market, a vertical application has a hard life. If such an application does not have the momentum like Apache, LibreOffice and Firefox, it will be abused and finally die because of intense forking and no funding. So our main apps are closed source and thus plain copyrighted, for example:

  • ACME
  • CUPRO
  • CUSTD
  • CUFOR
• In most cases we simply can not transfer copyrights from NedCAD to your organization because NedCAD modules, libraries, are used elsewhere, it would result legal issues with many involved parties.
  • It is not in your interest because we actively develop and constantly improve these libraries.
• However,

  • Some software is licensed under GPL3 or higher. See http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0-standalone.html

  • Almost all text and art is licensed under CC By SA 4.0 or higher. See http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode. So images and texts on this wiki can be reused as CreativeCommons By SA, where By means that you have to attribute the source (nedcad.nl) and SA means Share Alike, keep license the same so that others can use your works too.