legal March 2016

legal@lists.fedoraproject.org

8 participants
5 discussions

Henry Spencer's license
by Petr Šabata 06 Mar '23

06 Mar '23

Dear legal, While checking the contents of our `perl' package, I noticed the following: (...) /* NOTE: this is derived from Henry Spencer's regexp code, and should not * confused with the original package (see point 3 below). Thanks, Henry! */ /* Additional note: this code is very heavily munged from Henry's version * in places. In some spots I've traded clarity for efficiency, so don't * blame Henry for some of the lack of readability. */ /* The names of the functions have been changed from regcomp and * regexec to pregcomp and pregexec in order to avoid conflicts * with the POSIX routines of the same names. */ (...) * pregcomp and pregexec -- regsub and regerror are not used in perl * * Copyright (c) 1986 by University of Toronto. * Written by Henry Spencer. Not derived from licensed software. * * Permission is granted to anyone to use this software for any * purpose on any computer system, and to redistribute it freely, * subject to the following restrictions: * * 1. The author is not responsible for the consequences of use of * this software, no matter how awful, even if they arise * from defects in it. * * 2. The origin of this software must not be misrepresented, either * by explicit claim or by omission. * * 3. Altered versions must be plainly marked as such, and must not * be misrepresented as being the original software. * **** Alterations to Henry's code are... **** **** Copyright (C) 1991, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, **** 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008 **** by Larry Wall and others **** **** You may distribute under the terms of either the GNU General Public **** License or the Artistic License, as specified in the README file. (...) You can see the whole file here: https://metacpan.org/source/SHAY/perl-5.20.1/regexec.c I looked but couldn't find any common name for this license of Henry's. Is it on our list? Is it free? What name should I use in the License tag? Thank you, Petr

5 9

MMIX
by Yaakov Selkowitz 07 Apr '16

07 Apr '16

MMIX is the successor to Donald Knuth's MIX machine in later editions of The Art of Computer Programming. The canonical software implementation is made available with the following license: http://mmix.cs.hm.edu/websvn/wsvn/MMIX/mmixware/trunk/boilerplate.w While the wording is different from the same author's license on TeX (approved as the "Knuth license"), the intent appears to be the same. Is this acceptable for Fedora, and what name should be used? -- Yaakov Selkowitz Associate Software Engineer, ARM Red Hat, Inc.

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The limit of "free for non commercial use"
by Mattia Verga 23 Mar '16

23 Mar '16

I have a doubt about the "free for non commercial use" license. Let's say a software licensed under a Fedora good license uses data from a catalog (directly or indirectly - e.g. to create a custom catalog format) that is licensed "free for non commercial use". A good example for astronomy programs would be the NGC catalog from http://www.klima-luft.de/steinicke/ngcic/ngcic_e.htm or, in my actual case, https://github.com/dstndstn/astrometry.net/blob/master/catalogs/ngc2000-rea… I'm now packaging "astrometry" for Fedora and I actually removed that catalog from sources. What's the limit of the "free for non commercial use" statement? In this case can the catalog be maintained in sources? If the software is under a free license there's no "commercial use" involved, in my opinion. Thanks Mattia

2 1

Custom license for bencode.js
by Stuart Gathman 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

The cjdns package - https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1268716 - is GPLv3, with some stuff BSD, MIT, and ISC. I delete GPLv2 and ASL 2.0 stuff in %prep. There is one file, bencode.js, with a custom license: /* Copyright (c) 2009 Anton Ekblad Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions: The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software. */ IANAL, but it seems like BSD to me. But I was advised to ask legal(a)lists.fedoraproject.org when in doubt.

3 3

OSGi Enterprise licensing
by Pavel Raiskup 16 Mar '16

16 Mar '16

Marek Goldmann wrote: > Most probably we'll need to package OSGi Enterprise, but I'm not sure > about licensing of this project. > > The code itself (included in the.jar file, another story...) is ASL 2.0, > but if you try to download it from the website, you need to agree to this: > > http://www.osgi.org/Download/Release5?info=nothanks > > Which is no more, no less OSGi Specification License, listed as bad > license on the wiki: > > http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#Bad_Licenses > > You can also download it directly, without the need to agree to the > license on the website: > > http://www.osgi.org/download/r4v42/osgi.enterprise.jar > http://www.osgi.org/download/r5/osgi.enterprise-5.0.0.jar > > How should we deal with it? Are we authorized to package it under ASL 2.0? > > Thanks! Hi, I am unable to find any response to this message in mail archives. The Y2016 update: * How have we dealt with this? * Are we OK to package the osgi.enterprise now? * Do we depend on osgi.enterprise namespace somewhere (Fedora/CentOS/RHEL) * if that is not Fedora friendly license, is it OK to depend on it upstream? Thanks, Pavel

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legal March 2016