Re: [Fedora-legal-list] Fedora and MS-PL (Dynamic Language Runtime)
by Tom Callaway
On 08/15/2009 06:57 PM, Jimmy Schementi wrote:
> For what it's worth, IronRuby, IronPython, and the DLR are licensed under the "Microsoft Public License", which is OSI approved:
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html
>
> IronRuby is not associated with the "Microsoft Shared Source License".
Yes, I do understand that part. :) I was simply correcting the point
that the MS Shared Source License was in any way acceptable for Fedora
(it is not).
The MS Public License is acceptable for Fedora, Free but GPL
incompatible. I'm adding it to the table now.
~tom
14 years, 8 months
Fedora and MS-PL (Dynamic Language Runtime)
by C.J. Adams-Collier KF7BMP
Hey all,
We (the Debian CLI Libraries Team) are packaging IronRuby, IronPython
and the Dynamic Language Runtime for Debian. Much of the source in this
package is released under the Microsoft Public License:
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-cli-libs/packages/dlr-languages.git;a=blob;f...
I asked my friend Brett if he would help us get it packaged up in RPM
format for Fedora. He tells me that the MS-PL is not on the approved
list for Redhat packages:
14:55 < wakko666> cj: my main concern about packaging ironruby is licensing.
Fedora will accept packages under the MS-Shared-Source
license, but the MS-PL isn't on their list of acceptable
license.
14:58 < cj> wakko666: alrighty. jschementi is the guy to talk with about
licensing issues. He'll be back some time soon, I'm sure
14:58 < wakko666> of course, i can always write the spec file and you guys can
host your own rpms, but it would be nice to actually get it
into Fedora proper.
14:59 < cj> also, MS-PL is dfsg compliant and [OSI]-approved. Is it a decision
to deny MS-PL or that it just hasn't been reviewed yet?
14:59 < wakko666> not sure. we'd need to ask on the fedora-legal-list mailing
list
14:59 < wakko666> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing#SoftwareLicenses
[ed: I mis-wrote OSL-approved]
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ms-pl.html
I do not see MS-PL on the DFSG wiki page:
http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses
However, Mono contains code licensed under MS-PL and it is part of the
main section, implying that it is compliant:
http://git.debian.org/?p=pkg-mono/packages/mono.git;a=blob;f=debian/copyr...
Are the MS-PL pieces of Mono stripped from the Fedora package of Mono?
mcs/class/MicrosoftAjaxLibrary/*
mcs/class/System.Web.Mvc/*
Looking forward to your response,
C.J.
14 years, 8 months
Legal CD/DVD/BD writing software for RedHat and Fedora
by Joerg Schilling
Hi!
In former times, there was an excellent cooperative relationship between the
development of cdrtools and the various Linux distributions (in special with
Debian). Unfortunately, this changed in Spring 2004, a few months after the
Debian package maintainer for the cdrtools has been replaced with a new and
non-cooperative "downstream".
As a result, during the past few years, many Linux users have become upset
from the results of a completely unneeded conflict initiated by the
non-cooperative "downstream" package maintainer. Many Linux distributions
(including RedHat and Fedora) have become victims of this conflict. The
conflict started in May 2004 with some anti-OSS and anti-social actions
against the OSS project bundle "cdrtools".
The non-cooperative "downstream" package maintainer started his high profile
attack against the cdrtools project in May 2004. His attacks have been based
on his personal frustration that was solely caused by his missing
programming skills and his personal concept of dealing with these deficits.
He later extended his attacks and finally incorrectly claimed that there were
license problems in the cdrtools project and created a fork.
As _reaction_ on his claims and in order to defend the freedom of the
cdrtools software against these claims that have been based on an incorrect
GPL interpretation (it would turn the GPL into a non-free license if taken
seriously), the license of the original software was changed to avoid the GPL
as far as possible. This was done after many people from the OSS community and
several lawyers have been asked about possible problems, caused by the planned
license change. As nobody did see a problem, the license change was carried
out. A lot of new code and functionality was introduced since then and many
older bugs have been fixed in the original software. Nearly 50% of the current
code is code that was introduced or rewritten after the license change did take
place.
Note that the people who claim that there is a "potential problem that might
result in a lawsuit" did never verify a possible problem and as they do not
even own any Copyright on the code, they themselves are not allowed to sue
people based on the cdrtools code.
At the same time, the fork introduced many new bugs and questionable changes
that reduced it's portability and it's usability. While the code quality of
the fork declined, some of the changes introduced Copyright law violations [1]
and even GPL [2] violations, making the fork undistributable. In December 2006
the initiators of the unlawful changes have been contacted and informed in
depth about the violations. They have been asked to make the fork legal again
to no avail.
Eight months after the fork was created, the development of the fork stopped
on May 6th 2007 as it's initiator stopped "working" on it. For some time, I
was in hope that the big number of bugs in the fork (there are approx. 150
different bugs in total if you sum up all entries from all bug tracking
systems from various Linux distributors) and the fact that it is no longer
actively been worked on, would cause the Linux distributions to return to the
legal original software. This did unfortunately not happen.
I did wait a long time in hope that the problem will go away initiated from
judiciousness but after some time, I am no longer willing to tolerate the
distribution of the questionable fork.
About a year ago, I asked the Sun Microsystems legal department to do another
full legal review for the original software to make sure that none of the
claims from the people who attack cdrtools is valid. In October 2008, the
Sun legal department confirmed that there is no legal problem with the
original software.
At CeBIT on March 6th 2009, there was a meeting with me (Jörg Schilling, the
main developer and main Copyright holder), Simon Phipps (the Sun Microsystems
OpenSource Evangelist), a neutral observer and a FTP-master from Debian.
During this meeting, Debian agreed to start shipping the original software
again as soon as possible.
I am in hope that RedHat and Fedora will also start to distribute the original
software again and stop distributing the fork "cdrkit" because it is in
conflict with the Copyright law [3] because it is full of well known bugs and
because it is missing most features, people today expect from such software.
Missing features are a typical result from decoupling from the main stream
development. The source in the fork is based on 4 year old sources from
the original. Note that working on the code from the fork is not an option as
the initiators rejected to remove the Copyright violations 30 months ago and
as too many show stopper bugs are unfixed in the fork since more than 24
months.
I am looking forward to see RedHat and Fedora start to ship again the legal
original software from
ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/cdrecord/alpha/
and rejoin the community of OSS and user friendly distributions. Don't let the
OSS users suffer anymore from the conflict introduced by a single hostile
person. RedHat and Fedora should deliver what people need in order to be able
to write CDs/DVDs/BluRays and this is the original software.
The original software is easy to compile (you just need to type "make" - or
better "smake") and it is 100% complete, so it does not need any unusual
software package besides a compiler. The original software is expected to be
always bug-free as bug fixes typically take only a few hours.
The original software strictly follows all written conditions from the GPL [4].
Under the assumption that the GPL is a free OSS license [5] (and in special
is compatible with the text in section 9 of the OSS definition) and that
typical Linux distributions are at least mostly legal, the license
combinations used in cdrtools are of course legal too, according to the best
GPL explanation [6] [7] I could find in the net and of course according to the
Sun Microsystems legal department. Lawrence Rosen, the Author of [6] and [7]
advised the Open Source Initiative (www.opensource.org).
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
Some statistics on the project activities:
Cdrecord started as project in January 1996, but it was built on top
of older Code (e.g. libschily from 1984, libscg from 1986 and the schily
makefile system from 1992). Cdrtools include now also e.g. mkisofs that
started as Project in September 1993 and that is maintained by the cdrtools
project since spring 1997. The license change towards using CDDL for most
code has been done on May 15th 2006.
In the time between January 1985 and December 1995, there have been
638 file putbacks done in 385 groups (385 unique delta comments).
In the time between January 1996 and May 14th 2006, there have been
8847 file putbacks done in 4280 groups (4280 unique delta comments).
In the time between May 15th 2006 and today, there have been
4735 file putbacks done in 1695 groups (1695 unique delta comments).
Approx 30% of all putbacks have been made after May 15th 2006, this is
why the fork misses so many features people like to see today....
In the time past May 6th 2007, there have been
2441 file putbacks done in 882 groups (882 unique delta comments).
During the same time, there have been 63 putbacks in the fork. This
why people call the fork "dead".
In other words: the original software has a sustained rate between 2.5 and 3
file changes per day since more than 13 years. This is why there are no know
bugs and no known problems with the original software.
While the original project did deliver ~ 50 new releases (that did not have
any known bugs at the time of delivery) since May 15th 2006, the fork did not
deliver a single release without plenty of well known bugs.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------
[1] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/__13.html
[2] Whether it not the GPL violations apply to Redhat and Fedora also,
depends on the way a typical Redhat/Fedora installation looks like.
[3] http://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/index.html
[4] http://www.opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php
[5] http://www.opensource.org/docs/definition.php
[6] http://www.rosenlaw.com/html/GPL.PDF
[7] http://www.rosenlaw.com/Rosen_Ch06.pdf
Please help to defend OpenSource Software against attacks!
Best Regards
Jörg
--
EMail:joerg@schily.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
js(a)cs.tu-berlin.de (uni)
joerg.schilling(a)fokus.fraunhofer.de (work) Blog: http://schily.blogspot.com/
URL: http://cdrecord.berlios.de/private/ ftp://ftp.berlios.de/pub/schily
14 years, 8 months
License for wallpapers in old Fedora releases
by Nicu Buculei
At the Design-Team we figured it would be handy to provide (perhaps in a
gallery) wallpapers from the old releases, so the users who liked them
can have a handy access at the images. It is also useful to have when
documenting our history.
However, we have a licensing issue with the images created before the
team establishment, from Fedora Core 1 to Fedora 7, when they were
created behing the closed doors, at the Red Hat Desktop Team.
My understanding is, being created Red Hat employees as part of their
normal job and included into Fedora, those should have some Free license.
However, for compatibility with the artwork produced currently and for
easy access by everybody, it would be useful to have access to those
images under a CreativeCommons license (Attribution or Attribution -
Share Alike).
From seeing the recent license chance of the wiki, I expect the license
change for old wallpapers to be also doable but legal advice is needed.
--
nicu :: http://nicubunu.ro :: http://nicubunu.blogspot.com/
14 years, 8 months
Does input method table count as software?
by Ding Yi Chen
Hi,
I am packing Dayi3, a Chinese input method for IBus.
The license of the table (as shown in
http://code.google.com/p/openvanilla/source/browse/trunk/Modules/SharedDa... )
states:
This table is authorized by Taiyi (http://www.dayi.com) for free
download and use.
Users may not distribute the modified character encoding rules,
but can change the table format for other input method and platform.
Input method tables are data tables that at least contain two fields:
"input code" and corresponding character. These tables are not
executable, and require input method engine such as ibus-table or
scim-table to load them.
I am not sure whether input method table is a software or a content.
If it is a software, what's the license?
If it is a content, is CC-BY-ND appropriate?
Regards,
--
Ding-Yi Chen
Software Engineer
Internationalization Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Looking to carve out IT costs?
www.apac.redhat.com/promo/carveoutcosts/
14 years, 8 months
License for programs and data that can only be used in GPL/LGPL/BSD/PD applications?
by Ding Yi Chen
Hi,
I am interested in importing voice data of gcin (Yet another Chinese input system) to Fedora.
However, the README of the voice data states (translated to English):
This data is recorded by sprec. This voice data can only be used in
GPL, LGPL, BSD and Public Domain software.
Data files converted/extended from this voice data should also follow this term.
What license should we put for this kind of software/data?
Regards,
--
Ding-Yi Chen
Software Engineer
Internationalization Group
Red Hat, Inc.
Looking to carve out IT costs?
www.apac.redhat.com/promo/carveoutcosts/
14 years, 8 months
