Hi Fedora legals, I would like to ask you if you can help me and Leif from Tanukisoftware.
They had some modification to GPLv2 which make their product Tanukiwrapper non-free. It was reviewed here year ago: http://www.mail-archive.com/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/msg00253.html Their motivation is stated below. If you can help him to clear the license, I will be very glad.
Please cc in reply Leif as he is not subscribed to this mailing list.
I would say (but IANAL) that best solution is to release it under GPLv2 *and* MIT license and state that all files are licensed under GPLv2, but files foo and directory bar, which are licensed under MIT (Leif can you state which parts are under MIT?). However, I'm not sure how to enforce presence of startup banner in license.
Thanks in advance Miroslav Suchy
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: Re: Java Service Wrapper Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:03:05 +0900 From: Leif Mortenson leif.mortenson@tanukisoftware.com To: Miroslav Suchý msuchy@redhat.com
Miroslav, Thank you for your quick reply. Searing, I found you old email. My sincere apologies for letting that slip through the cracks.
The changes we made in the Community License were simply to add that we wanted our startup banner to remain, and to include required references to a 3rd party MIT license. There was no intention to cause any problems or make it incompatible with GPL2.
If you could please put me in touch with your legal team as you originally offered, I would be happy to work with them to get this resolved ASAP.
Sincerely, Leif Mortenson Tanuki Software, Ltd.
2011/8/15 Miroslav Suchý msuchy@redhat.com:
On 08/15/2011 05:04 AM, Leif Mortenson wrote:
Miroslav, I am with Tanuki Software, the company which owns and develops the Java Service Wrapper. Recently a fork of a very old version of the Wrapper was made without changing the name of the project. This is very confusing to our customers and we have been unsuccessfully trying to get in touch with them about changing the name they are using. https://bitbucket.org/ivertex
It appears that you are working on adding this to your Fedora project. We are hoping to get this resolved with a simple name change. Once that is done I would like to avoid causing you or your users any
I'm afraid that I can do very little about it. The package name in Fedora should match upstream. And that is "Java service wrapper". So please talk to ivertex - the upstream maintainer.
problems or confusion with the package being renamed. I would
Future rename in Fedora is without problem.
If you would like to get an official Java Service Wrapper into Fedora, the Community edition is GPL2 and we would be happy to work with you if any changes are needed to make it ready to be a package.
Well you can. In fact I tried to get original Tanukiwrapper into Fedora, but I had legal problem. You distribute it under GPLv2 plus your own license prefix, which make it effectively non-free.
I sent emails to info@tanukisoftware.com, sales@tanukisoftware.com and support@tanukisoftware.com following email.
Hi, I would like to maintain and package Tanukiwrapper for Fedora. It has been there in past, but has been orphaned recently and is not present in last Fedora 14. Last packaged version is 3.2.3, which has been released under BSD license. I would like to pack latest greatest version of community version of Tanukiwrapper, but I find some problems with wording of "Community License Agreement" (CLA).
Your changes to GPLv2 make the CLA non-free license, which is probably not intended.
You may take a look at quick Fedora review at: http://www.mail-archive.com/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/msg00253.html
May I ask you to change the text of license? I see several possibilities:
- Either by dropping your prefix of GPLv2 and make it GPLv2 only,
- or by available as GPLv2 or some license of your own (so I use is
under GPLv2 only) 3) or reword your CLA and clear up the term "Product" and put back "How to Apply" section. Other actions may be needed, I'm not lawyer, but I can get you in touch with somebody from Fedora Legals.
I very strongly believe that this fork happened because of this legal problem. And if you help to resolve it, so the Tanukiwrapper will be re-distributable again, then there will be no reason for the fork.
-- Miroslav Suchy Red Hat Satellite Engineering
On 08/15/2011 03:28 AM, Miroslav Suchý wrote:
I would say (but IANAL) that best solution is to release it under GPLv2 *and* MIT license and state that all files are licensed under GPLv2, but files foo and directory bar, which are licensed under MIT (Leif can you state which parts are under MIT?).
I would agree with this part.
However, I'm not sure how to enforce presence of startup banner in license.
Honestly, requiring that will make the license non-free, especially since the base license would be GPLv2.
Is there any chance of simply dropping this requirement?
It might be possible to come up with some sort of exception that means:
While you are permitted to modify or remove the startup banner, if you choose to modify or remove the startup banner, you must rename the code from Tanukiwrapper.
(Please note, this is the English version, the legalese version will likely be a lot longer and nastier, which is why I'd prefer to simply avoid it, if possible.)
~tom
== Fedora Project
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Miroslav Suchý -
Tom Callaway