[Fedora-legal-list] IBM non-free patent notice (Was: Re: SPDX Statistics - R.U.R. edition)

On Mon, 2023-09-18 at 20:47 -0400, Richard Fontana wrote: > While the Sun RPC problem *may* have been excised from glibc, just > last year we found another license in glibc (and at least one other > package), this time an IBM license [1], that we consider non-free by > present day standards, in that case because it involves a patent > license grant that discriminates according to specific use cases. I > think we should aspire to finding, *exposing*, and fixing these kinds > of problems. Exposing should mean at a minimum that we don't > perpetuate a community-wide decades-old practice of covering these > problems up, which seems to be one practical effect of indulging in > effective licensing. I realize all this doesn't itself justify the > resulting use of complex composite SPDX expressions. Right, I assume you are talking about the resolv code which carries a patent notice from IBM saying they might sue you if you use that code for anything else than doing DNS resolving over TCP/IP. Which is indeed a odd notice. Happy you found it and you are making IBM fix it. But IMHO it is just an unintended, license, bug in the upstream package. It will be fixed, so no need for some complicated license tag.