legal October 2021

legal@lists.fedoraproject.org

9 participants
5 discussions

FIGlet fonts
by Lyes Saadi 25 Jul '22

25 Jul '22

Hello Legal, I'm bringing back a discussion from 2012[1]: Figlet fonts! Indeed, I am trying to package python-pyfiglet[2] as a dependency for other packages. But, after the review, it came up that a lot of weird fonts were included. At the time, I didn't know anything about the discussion, and decided to abort everything. Recently though, a developer contacted me through the bug report, and proposed to help on the issue. He triaged the fonts and separated them depending on whether they were Open-Source or not, and we were thus able to create a clean package with none of the problematic fonts in it. In that discussion[3], emerged the fact that a discussion over this already happened ([1]), but it seems that either no consensus was reached, or that such consensus was lost to time as I wasn't able to find any conversation on figlet either on legal or devel mailing lists archives. And, it seems that the issue was just simply avoided since figlet ended up removing the problematic fonts anyway. But, upstream would like to keep the problematic fonts if possible in Fedora. And so, I would like to ask Legal to either give me the answer, if it actually was a settled matter, or to reach a consensus on Figlet fonts. To resume the situation (as I understand it, I am not a lawyer, obviously): In the US, fonts glyphs are not copyright-able as it is considered insufficiently creative. For the same reason, Bitmap fonts (fonts defined pixel by pixel) are also not copyright-able, as they are only considered as data which represents glyphs. But, Vector fonts (fonts defined using drawing instructions and code), is, on the other hand, copyright-able because it is defined through a software code. Then, we come to Figlet fonts. For those not aware of what Figlet fonts, they are also known as ASCII fonts: __ __ ____ __ ____ / / / /__ / / /___ / / ___ ____ _____ _/ / / / /_/ / _ \/ / / __ \ / / / _ \/ __ `/ __ `/ / / / __ / __/ / / /_/ / / /___/ __/ /_/ / /_/ / /_/ /_/ /_/\___/_/_/\____( ) /_____/\___/\__, /\__,_/_(_) |/ /____/ The issue with those is that no ruling (as far as I know) ever concerned that type of font in US Court. Though, one argument would be that Figlet fonts are similar to Bitmap fonts, as they only contain data about glyphs, and do not, in the same way as Vector fonts do, contain code giving to the computer drawing instructions for the fonts. As such Figlet fonts are not modular, or extensible, they just contain raw data about a font. But still, all this is speculation, and, as I said, I am not a lawyer, so I don't have any slight idea if such a defense would hold in court. I hope to have resumed the situation clearly enough and that I didn't make any mistake. Greetings, Lyes Saadi [1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820642 [2]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1876108 [3]: https://github.com/pwaller/pyfiglet/issues/89 PS: Can we remove the FE-legal blocker from the review request now that all the fonts have been sorted out?

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Brainpool Curves in Fedora (openssl, libgcrypt, gnupg)
by Timothée Ravier 06 Apr '22

06 Apr '22

Hi everyone, The ECC Brainpool Curves [1][2] are currently not available in Fedora as according to this BZ [3], this needs Fedora Legal approval. Could someone from the legal team take a look to see if there are any blockers regarding Brainpool Curves inclusion in Fedora? Thanks! [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliptic-curve_cryptography#Implementation [2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc5639 [3] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1413618

9 21

Caldera? license, OpenSolaris license?
by Pavel Raiskup 26 Oct '21

26 Oct '21

I wanted to test some shell compatibility features recently, and I came across the need to test ksh88 like shell. I noticed there's heilroom-sh project [1, 2] that I'd like to package at least in Fedora Copr so I could easily test in the future. Though there are two license files I'm afraid are not really mentioned neither in good/bad list of licenses (attached) so far. I believe they are good (BSD and CDDL modification), but I'd appreciate an explicit check, and perhaps fixing the Fedora licensing [3] wiki page. [1] http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html [2] https://sourceforge.net/projects/heirloom/files/heirloom-sh/050706/heirloom… [3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main?rd=Licensing#SoftwareLicenses Thank you, Pavel

6 7

Qt package licenses
by Jerry James 19 Oct '21

19 Oct '21

This is a copy of a message sent to fedora-devel-list 1 week ago, so far with no reply. I'm doing a review of a MinGW build of a Qt 6 package: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2009214 During the license check portion of the review, I have become increasingly convinced that our qt5-* and qt6-* packages have incorrect License fields. Currently they have "LGPLv2 with exceptions or GPLv3 with exceptions". I believe that most or all of them should have one of these two instead: - LGPLv3 or GPLv2+ - LGPLv3 or GPLv2+ with exceptions Would someone read through the comments on that bug and indicate whether you think the analysis is correct or not, please? -- Jerry James http://www.jamezone.org/

1 0

The FPCA’s “Moral Rights Clause Waiver” should be updated for CC BY-SA 4.0
by Jason Yundt 18 Oct '21

18 Oct '21

Hello, In the FCPA <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement#F…>, The definition for “Moral Rights Clause Waiver” references “Section 4d of CC-BY-SA”, but that subsection doesn’t exist <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode#s4>. Also, the Other FAQs <https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contributor_Agreement#O…>’s first two questions still refer to CC BY-SA 3.0 even though the FCPA has been updated to use CC BY-SA 4.0. Jason Yundt

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legal October 2021