legal March 2009

legal@lists.fedoraproject.org

26 participants
29 discussions

Re: [Fedora-legal-list] CAcert.org license
by Tom Callaway 12 Feb '16

12 Feb '16

On Tue, 2008-12-09 at 23:03 +0100, Matthias Saou wrote: > > >>>>> "TC" == Tom \"spot\" Callaway <Tom> writes: > > > > TC> Given that it does not give permission for us to redistribute (the > > TC> cornerstone requirement for Content licenses), this license is not > > TC> acceptable for Fedora. > > > > I guess I'm glad I looked before approving the package, but I have to > > wonder: Do the cacert folks actually want anyone to use their > > certificates? I mean, this prevents basically everyone from using > > them, because they can't come with the OS or the browser. > > Personally, the more I read the document, the more I'm confused. > > "You may NOT distribute certificates or root keys under this > licence"... does this mean we can distribute under a different license? Well, sortof. The wording here is strange because you can get a different license from the CA issuer. We can't just pick a license, but the CA issuer might be willing to give us a different one. > Would it be worth getting in contact with CAcert.org in order to try > and have them allow us to redistribute the root certs under conditions > which are acceptable to the Fedora Project? Probably, yes. :) ~spot

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Potential problem with Bitttorrent DHT
by David Nielsen 01 Apr '09

01 Apr '09

As is pointed out by upstream for Monsoon, Novell have disallowed DHT implementation from the openSUSE repos based on a legal risk as assessed by openSUSE Legal. The precise nature of the problem is unclear from the initial mail but Alan McGovern says he will provide information to interested parties, as such I would like some input from Fedora Legal if the problem applies to Fedora as well. Relevant information https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492297 http://lists.opensuse.org/opensuse-gnome/2009-03/msg00048.html Regards, David Nielsen (I am not on the list so please CC me)

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Repackaging mono to include support for Silverlight
by Paul F. Johnson 31 Mar '09

31 Mar '09

i, I've had a request from rpmfusion to rebuild mono with the --with-moonlight flag set. This builds in the functionality required to build Silverlight on rpmfusion. I am aware that Fedora itself cannot have Silverlight in (the licence is the MS "shared source" (cough) licence) due to the potential for MS to do it's usual trick of going back on their word and applying patents to cause problems. While adding in the smcs and silverlight code possibly does not break any of the fedora rules, I am of the thinking that we don't add the flag for the same reason that we have disabled xmms for mp3; it has the potential to cause us problems. If I get the okay to build mono with the flag, I will. TTFN Paul -- Sie können mich aufreizen und wirklich heiß machen!

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What should we do to use fedora like this?
by scottsiu 31 Mar '09

31 Mar '09

Dear sir: We are Guangtian technology Ltd. Co., a System Integrator in China, and we have a issue on selling Fedora. We want to ask for your advice. A local notebook PC producer, which we did technical support for, wants to pre-install Fedora in their computers before selling them. We pre-install Fedora(community version) and add driver accordingly prior to sales. Can we use community version like that? Do we need to do something before that? Best regards, Scott Siu

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GPL exceptions for kvirc
by Alexey Torkhov 28 Mar '09

28 Mar '09

Hi. I'm looking over kvirc package https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=492690 and it contains GPL license with following addition: --- 13. As a special exception, Szymon Stefanek gives permission to link this program with Qt non-commercial edition for Windows, and distribute the resulting executable, without including the source code for the Qt non-commercial edition in the source distribution. The Qt non-commercial edition library is covered by the Qt Non-Commercial license. See http://www.trolltech.com for informations. 14. As a special exception, Szymon Stefanek gives permission to link this program with the OpenSSL project's "OpenSSL" library (or with modified versions of it that use the same license as the "OpenSSL" library), and distribute the linked executables. You must obey the GNU General Public License in all respects for all of the code used other than "OpenSSL". If you modify file(s), you may extend this exception to your version of the file(s), but you are not obligated to do so. If you do not wish to do so, delete this exception statement from your version. --- Will it be appropriate to use "GPLv2+ with exceptions" as license field? Full text of their license could be found here: https://svn.kvirc.de/kvirc/browser/trunk/kvirc/doc/COPYING?rev=2469 It is a bit strange that openssl is incompatible with GPL. It looks to me that quite some number of GPLed projects could use openssl without noticing this. Alexey

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lcc
by Ian Weller 28 Mar '09

28 Mar '09

See attached license. This comes with tremulous and (soon to be packaged) tremfusion. tremulous currently deals with this license as being non-free and removing it from the tarball. I'd like to double check whether or not this is free, and if not, why not. -- Ian Weller <ianweller(a)gmail.com> GnuPG fingerprint: E51E 0517 7A92 70A2 4226 B050 87ED 7C97 EFA8 4A36

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Re: Speech recognition
by Milos Jakubicek 27 Mar '09

27 Mar '09

Olivier Galibert wrote: > On Wed, Mar 25, 2009 at 04:44:20PM -0600, Jerry James wrote: >> Is anybody interested in working with me on getting some voice >> recognition product packaged up in usable form on Fedora? > > For speech recognition, software is only part of the problem and, > fundamentally, the easiest one (take the algorithms, implement them, > optimize/debug at will). The real problem is the data needed to build > the models to feed the algorithms. There isn't as far as I know any > reasonable set of corpus available under an open source license usable > to build a decent speech recognizer. Which makes open source speech > recognition something not doable yet. > > OG. (I'm sorry for cross-posting to fedora-legal) Well, the most interesting question here for me is what about licensing such language models -- could they be considered to be firmware (redistributable, not modifiable)? This is important also because of their size (shipping 1G+ corpora, even compressed, is probably not a right way to go). Regards, Milos

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Move code vs content into licensing guidelines
by Rahul Sundaram 27 Mar '09

27 Mar '09

Hi This entire section would be a better fit as part of the licensing guidelines, IMO. http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/Guidelines#Code_Vs_Content The distinction is important because packaging committee is not in charge of the licensing guidelines. Rahul

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Fedora guidelines on patents
by Rahul Sundaram 27 Mar '09

27 Mar '09

Hi Looks like we are getting a lot of discussions on patents in fedora-devel list now. Perhaps the section on patents can explicitly mention our stand point on patents a bit more clearer? I am thinking of something like the following within the guidelines or in a separate page references by the guidelines: --- Any patent system that allows patents over software (Not just US but other countries around the world) is flawed and it is almost impossible to develop any complex software without infringing on patents and this is a pretty difficult problem especially for Free and open source software. The Fedora policy is that we will try to avoid patent infringement issues by refraining from including software that has patent encumbered components where the patent owners are known to be aggressive and are enforcing the patents actively. If you suspect that you might be including code that is affected by patents such aggressive enforcers, it is recommend that you contact Fedora Legal in private (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal#Contact) since raising these issues in a public forum can draw the attention of patent owners and bring unnecessary legal trouble to developers. Free software developers should avoid trying to do the patent searches themselves. Many software patents are unenforceable or invalid but knowingly infringing on patents will have a higher penalty in many legal systems (In US, you will have to pay triple damages). There are multiple ways of dealing with problematic patent issues. a) get the patent owners to license the patents in writing in way that is compatible with free and open source including but not limited to the requirements of GPL license (http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Packaging/LicensingGuidelines#Patented_Softwa…). b) upstream developers might be able to use a plugin system and Fedora can simply refrain from including those plugins. Users from regions where software patents are not valid can continue using such plugins obtained from third party repositories. This is the case for multimedia frameworks such as gstreamer included in Fedora c) upstream developers might be able to workaround the patent by using a different implementation technique. You must coordinate with professional legal people on this. d) find prior art that invalidates those patents with the help of professional legal people. --- Comments? Rahul

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License compatibility and preloaded libraries
by Jason L Tibbitts III 26 Mar '09

26 Mar '09

I've found a package that contains a a library intended to be shimmed into the system with LD_PRELOAD. The library itself is under the CPL license. Are there any troubling issues surrounding dynamic linking of a CPL-licensed library in this manner? My take on this is that we couldn't link CPL code with, say, GPL code together and distribute the resulting binary, but when the end user performs that linking by setting LD_PRELOAD and running a binary, they aren't distributing the result so there's no license violation. It's all pretty much beyond me, though. - J<

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legal March 2009