Re: [Fedora-legal-list] CAcert.org license
by Tom Callaway
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
8 years, 2 months
Repackaging mono to include support for Silverlight
by Paul F. Johnson
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!
15 years
What should we do to use fedora like this?
by scottsiu
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
15 years
GPL exceptions for kvirc
by Alexey Torkhov
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
15 years, 1 month
lcc
by Ian Weller
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
15 years, 1 month
Re: Speech recognition
by Milos Jakubicek
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
15 years, 1 month
Fedora guidelines on patents
by Rahul Sundaram
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_Soft...).
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
15 years, 1 month
License compatibility and preloaded libraries
by Jason L Tibbitts III
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<
15 years, 1 month
