systemc license

[Orcan Ogetbil]

Dear fellow rpmfusion contributors,
Chitlesh has been working on this systemc package [1] for a while and I have been reviewing it. It came to the point where the package is Fedora-ready. I have been thinking about it a lot but I couldn't come to a decision about the license [2]. FE-Legal suggested a few changes [3] in this license to make it "Free", but the upstream rejected to do these changes.

The 5th section is the one that kind-of scares me. It talks about the liabilities of distributors. There is a bit subtlety there about the definition of a "Distributor" who, as the license claims, is potentially responsible for recovery of the damages and the losses caused by the systemc software. FE-Legal's suggestion was to replace the word "Distributor" with "Commercial Distributor", to save the non-commercial distributors from this liability.

I want to hear some opinions, if possible, from our community. Will rpmfusion be liable of any charges resulting from the distribution of this software? Please read the section 5 of the license [2] and FE-Legal's suggestions [3] that got rejected.


[1] https://bugzilla.rpmfusion.org/show_bug.cgi?id=151
[2] http://www.systemc.org/about/org_docs/license/
[3] http://chitlesh.fedorapeople.org/systemC/tom.txt