On Saturday 17 June 2006 23:02, Joe Smith took the opportunity to write:
> "Magnus Holmgren" <holmgren@lysator.liu.se> wrote in message
> [🔎] 200606172024.20240@proffe.kibibyte.se">news:200606172024.20240@proffe.kibib
>yte.se...
>
> > What about the statement on http://antispam.yahoo.com/domainkeys?
> >
> > "Yahoo!'s DomainKeys Intellectual Property may be licensed under either
> > of the following terms:
> > * Yahoo! DomainKeys Patent License Agreement
> > * GNU General Public License version 2.0 (and no other version)."
>
> Hmm.. the GPL does not deal directly with the patents, however,
> That statement presumably means that they grant a patent licence for all
> programs under the GPL 2.
Confusing. We need a clarification.
> The sourceforge site only mentions the patent licence version 1-2. The
> software is published under the "Public Licence", which contains all of the
> terms of the patent licence, and additional terms dealing with the
> software.
>
> So while the patents can be used by a GPL2'd program, the licence of
> software on source, the souceforge software is not GPL'd, is definately not
> GPL2-compatible, and is most likely not DFSG-free.
But if an entity releases a piece of software under one license, then later
publicly gives everyone permission to use it under a different licence (and
is in the capacity of doing so), surely anyone can choose to excercise that
permission?
> > Also, the links on http://domainkeys.sourceforge.net/ to "Other Libraries"
> > seem to indicate that it's OK to release DomainKeys libraries packages
> > with DomainKeys in their name.
>
> That does not mean they do not violate the licence.
Do we know that they haven't received permission? Of course that won't help
us...
> At the very least they
> violate trademark law. They are using the trademark as a name for their
> product.
But trademark law, like patent law, normally (it may be different in some
countries) only restricts *commercial* activities, doesn't it? So the author
of the Perl package can get away with it for that reason, even if "commerce"
can mean a lot.
> They do not have a trademark licence allowing that. At the worst,
> programs they are violating the patent agreement (unless they are GPL2'd)
> which means they have even greater liablity, as they presumably do not
> recive the rights under the patent agreement while they are violating it.
On the other hand, by including libdomainkeys in its distribution by that
name, Debian dosn't exactly use "DomainKeys" to endorse anything or as a
trademark in any way, though it's probably quite clearly "use[s] the
term 'DomainKeys' in or as part of a name [...] for Your Licensed Code".
> The only non-messy situation I can see is software under the GPL2 not using
> DomainKeys in the name.
We probably need an OpenSSL exception too. A question though: The GPL requires
all executables built from a work to be distributed with full source (except
for everything normally distributed with the major components of the OS
(except when the whole OS comes with the executable)). So merely compiling an
executable and distributing it means that you have to provide the source code
to all libraries under the GPL, even if the original author did not?
Can "further restrictions" be interpreted relative to any restrictions
already present due to dependencies in the original source? Otherwise, what's
the point?
To summarize: Great confusion (at least on my part, as you can see). Hopefully
permission to call the package libdomainkeys can be obtained, though it might
be harder to get a permission compatible with the DFSG.
Has there been any followup to
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2004/11/msg00072.html and/or any
official contact with Yahoo? I could submit a question via their feedback
form, but will I get a response? Is DK interesting enough that someone with a
more direct channel will take the time to contact Yahoo's legal department
about this (again)?
--
Magnus Holmgren holmgren@lysator.liu.se
(No Cc of list mail needed, thanks)
Attachment:
pgp0g5sofIqlp.pgp
Description: PGP signature