gmane.linux.debian.devel.legal

Re: Intellectual disobedience

Florian Weimer — 2012-05-22T20:52:06

* Paul Wise:


Whatever this is, it is too mainstream:

| Unfortunately, this SME-music-content is not available in Germany
| because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.

Re: Sun Microsystems, Inc. Binary Code License Agreement

Joerg Jaspert — 2012-05-22T10:56:01




Leave alone that, can you guarantee that (ii) won't hit?
(iv) is also impossible to do.
(v) Oh sure.

Sun Microsystems, Inc. Binary Code License Agreement

Mathieu Malaterre — 2012-05-21T12:35:42

Hi,

  I recently received a report that jai-* packages may not be
compatible with debian non-free. Specifically I am looking at
jai-core's MEDIALIB FOR JAI/SUPPLEMENTAL LICENSE TERMS section 2:

...
2. License to Distribute Software.  In addition to the license granted
in Section 1 (Software Internal Use and Development License Grant) of
these Supplemental Terms, subject to the terms and conditions of this
Agreement, including but not limited to, Section 3 (Java Technology
Restrictions) of these Supplemental Terms, Sun grants you a
non-exclusive, non-transferable, limited license to reproduce and
distribute the Software in binary code form only, provided that you (i)
distribute the Software complete and unmodified and only bundled as part
of your Programs, (ii) do not distribute additional software intended to
replace any component(s) of the Software, (iii) do not remove or alter
any proprietary legends or notices contained in the Software, (iv) only
distribute the Software subject to a license agreement th

Re: National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May2012

Timo Juhani Lindfors — 2012-05-15T10:35:08

Hi Clark and Francesco,

Poli <invernomuto< at >paranoici.org> writes:

Thanks for the comments, I've tried to forward them to the people who
wrote the license. I hope they'll adjust the last paragraph of 2.2 but
I'm afraid they won't adopt an existing open source license.

Re: Figlet relicensed from AFL to BSD-3

Jonathan McCrohan — 2012-05-14T09:31:44

Yes, those files have now been relicenced too. See the full diff for
details [1].

Jon

[1] http://xi.dereenigne.org/figlet/figlet_2.2.2_2.2.3.diff

Re: Figlet relicensed from AFL to BSD-3

MJ Ray — 2012-05-14T09:10:38

Jonathan McCrohan <jmccrohan< at >gmail.com>

If all the files are now under that licence, I think it is OK.

(crc.c, crc.h, inflate.c, inflate.h, zipio.c, zipio.h had a licence
that compelled distribution, not AFL.  I have not checked that they
are new-BSD too.)

Hope that helps,

Figlet relicensed from AFL to BSD-3

Jonathan McCrohan — 2012-05-14T08:37:41

[Originally sent yesterday, but silently dropped due to over-size.
Resending modified version now.]

Hi -legal,

I am currently working on an updated figlet package (which currently in
non-free see #274950 and [1]).

During my work I discovered that the 2.2.3 release [2] re-licensed the
package as BSD-3 clause. This was agreed with the authors on the figlet
mailing list [3].

The main changes are in the LICENCE [4] file, and the copyright header
in figlet.c [5]. I have asked for clarification from the current
upstream figlet maintainer, and and received confirmation that the main
package along with the 'ours' fonts are all BSD-3 licensed [6].

To me, this means that the main figlet package is now DFSG-compliant.
Would someone else be able to confirm for me that this package is ok to
move back from non-free to main?

Note: I am only concerned about the core package at the moment. (Though
I may be back to discuss a possible figlet-contrib-fonts package at a
later date.)

Thanks,
Jon

[1] https://lists.debian.o

Intellectual disobedience

Paul Wise — 2012-05-13T02:36:02

http://blog.ninapaley.com/2012/05/12/intellectual-disobedience/
http://www.youtube.com/?v=dfGWQnj6RNA

Re: Possible compatibility issue custom license versus GPL(2) incacti

Francesco Poli — 2012-05-12T13:47:05


Hello!


Thanks a lot for taking this issue seriously.


If the license you quoted is really the one that applies to those two
files, then I think there are some issues to be fixed.

First of all, that license is GPL-incompatible.
It also fails to meet the DFSG and hence those two files are non-free.
That license has so many GPL-incompatible and/or non-free restrictions,
that I won't even go into a detailed analysis...
I expect that other debian-legal regulars agree with this conclusion.

[...]

I think you should get in touch with upstream and explain them that
including those two files in their project makes cacti non-free.

Possible solutions I can think of:

 (A) if cacti may work without the non-free files (possibly with
reduced functionality), those files should be dropped entirely

 (B) if cacti cannot work without those files, appropriate DFSG-free
and GPL-compatible replacements should be found (or clean-room
developed)

 (C) Gubusoft should be contacted and persuaded to re-license those
files und

Possible compatibility issue custom license versus GPL(2) in cacti

Paul Gevers — 2012-05-12T09:19:51

Hi,

While working on the package cacti, I came across some files included in
that project where I am unsure of the distributability or compatibility
of the code, since the cacti project itself is under the GPL2 license.

The files in question are in the include/treeview folder which can be
viewed on-line at [1], i.e. ftiens4.js and ftiens4_export.js. As the
license for these files is not included in the project, but a link is
provided in the headers for these files, I took a look at the web-site
of the treeview project [2], where a link can be found to what I believe
are the two possible licenses for this source. I have copied the
Distributor's license below this e-mail. The part I am worried about is
this:
"""
    You are not authorized to download and/or use the TreeView source
code from this application for your own purposes.
"""

Could you please help me identifying if/what actions need to be taken?
If this license is incompatible with GPL2 I expect that I should at
least contact upstream about this lic

Re: National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May2012

Francesco Poli — 2012-05-11T20:39:33


Hi Timo, hi Clark,


I am convinced that a good Free Software license would be suitable for
releasing data.
Hence, I think that this license, even if it managed to meet the DFSG
(which it does *not*, in my own personal opinion!), would add nothing
useful to the already long list of existing licenses.
It just contributes to license proliferation, which is very bad.

[...]

I think it really depends on how it should be interpreted.

At best, this point could be seen as an attempt to implement a sort of
very weak copyleft-like mechanism. A really unclear attempt, though:
I don't know how effective it could be considered...

At worst, it could be seen as an attempt to make licensees responsible
for enforcing some clauses of the license, after redistributing the
work to other parties. I think this would be a non-free restriction.


In a very bad way: you *have* to comply, *when* the Licensor tells you
to do so. Even after your product or service has been initially
released.

I am personally convinced that such

Re: zlib specification license

Francesco Poli — 2012-05-11T20:03:25


Hi Simon!


To me it's really unclear whether this license really wants to grant
permission to make modifications and redistribute the result.

Do I understand correctly that the RFC documents you are referring to
are related to the zlib library?
I think the copyright holders for these RFC documents should really be
persuaded to re-license them under the terms of the zlib license [1].
It is always recommendable that the documentation for a program or
library is released under the same licensing terms as the program or
library itself.

[1] http://www.zlib.net/zlib_license.html

I hope this re-licensing may happen soon...

Re: National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May2012

Clark C. Evans — 2012-05-10T13:07:23

Timo,

I'm not sure why a open source license wouldn't work?
In any case, here are some comments.


It seems that these are OK, since these notices could be placed
into an "About" box or similar structure?


This one seems problematic since it would require some sort of
license assent mechanism.  Perhaps this requirement could be 
softened to be a conditional, if you require acceptance of your
own license, you must require acceptance of this one?


How do you comply with this given the other requirements?


Best,

Clark

zlib specification license

Simon Josefsson — 2012-05-10T09:26:21

Hi,

Has this license been evaluated before?  RFC 1950-1952 contains:

   Copyright (c) 1996 L. Peter Deutsch and Jean-Loup Gailly

   Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for any
   purpose and without charge, including translations into other
   languages and incorporation into compilations, provided that the
   copyright notice and this notice are preserved, and that any
   substantive changes or deletions from the original are clearly
   marked.

   A pointer to the latest version of this and related documentation in
   HTML format can be found at the URL
   <ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/png/documents/zlib/zdoc-index.html>.

The license initially doesn't give permissions to make modifications,
although it later require that any changes are clearly marked, which I
guess can be seen as the intention is to allow modifications.

Is the license DFSG-free?

/Simon

National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May 2012

Timo Juhani Lindfors — 2012-05-10T09:27:41

Hello,

I realize that -legal is mainly for getting advice on what can be
included in Debian. However, if somebody has extra time I'd like to get
a second opinion on the license that the National Land Survey of Finland
is using for the dataset that they recently made public. This data might
get imported to OSM soon so eventually it might reach Debian in some
form (as an example map for a car navigation program for example). I
personally find the last bullet point of section 2.2 non-free. Can you
find anything else that is problematic?

Full license from
http://www.maanmittauslaitos.fi/en/NLS_open_data_licence_version1_20120501
follows:





       National Land Survey open data licence - version 1.0 - 1 May 2012

1. General information

The National Land Survey of Finland (hereinafter the Licensor), as the holder of
the immaterial rights to the data, has granted on the terms mentioned below the
right to use a copy (hereinafter data or dataset(s)) of the data (or a part of
it).

The Licensee is a natural or l

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Re: filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

Mark Weyer — 2012-05-07T12:08:13


Just a quick note: If you are right about the incompatibility of CDDL-1 and
GPLv3 (others on this list will know if you are), then the combined work is
non-free: Its license terms discriminate against a field of endeavour, namely
developing a parser generator.

I am not a lawyer. Hope this helps,

  Mark Weyer

filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

Martin Steigerwald — 2012-05-07T10:46:41

Also sent to ITP bug for documentation.


Hi!

Alex and I almost finished packaging filebench:

VCS is at:

Vcs-Git: git://git.debian.org/collab-maint/filebench.git
Vcs-Browser: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/filebench.git;a=summary

There is some licensing questions left:

1) Most files use:

 * CDDL HEADER START
 *
 * The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 * Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
 * You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 *
 * You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
 * or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions
 * and limitations under the License.
 *
 * When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
 * file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
 * If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
 * fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifyin

filebench: bison generated parser + CDDL

Martin Steigerwald — 2012-05-07T10:43:01

Hi!

Alex and I almost finished packaging filebench:

VCS is at:

Vcs-Git: git://git.debian.org/collab-maint/filebench.git
Vcs-Browser: http://git.debian.org/?p=collab-maint/filebench.git;a=summary

There is some licensing questions left:

1) Most files use:

 * CDDL HEADER START
 *
 * The contents of this file are subject to the terms of the
 * Common Development and Distribution License (the "License").
 * You may not use this file except in compliance with the License.
 *
 * You can obtain a copy of the license at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE
 * or http://www.opensolaris.org/os/licensing.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions
 * and limitations under the License.
 *
 * When distributing Covered Code, include this CDDL HEADER in each
 * file and include the License file at usr/src/OPENSOLARIS.LICENSE.
 * If applicable, add the following below this CDDL HEADER, with the
 * fields enclosed by brackets "[]" replaced with your own identifying
 * information: Portions Copyright [yyyy

Re: Is m4 autoconf code "like a compiler or linker"?

Ben Finney — 2012-05-06T01:03:31


If they are part of the work in Debian, then we must comply with the
terms of the license to distribute them. Source packages and binary
packages are works in Debian.


No, since the compiler or linker is not part of the same work; these m4
files are part of the same work.


These m4 files (going by your description only) are more like what the
GPL refers to as “scripts to control” building the program. GPLv3 §1:

      The "Corresponding Source" for a work in object code form means
    all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an
    executable work) run the object code and to modify the work,
    including scripts to control those activities.

So the m4 files are part of the “corresponding source” for the work.

Re: Is m4 autoconf code "like a compiler or linker"?

Paul Elliott — 2012-05-05T19:52:41

I found out these files have now been packaged. (They used not to be.) So there 
is no problem.

But I would still like to know as a matter of theory, if the use of these files 
would require that their license be used.