Re: Sofia SIP COPYRIGHTS
George Danchev wrote:
> I believe that the reason to have that in Sofia-SIP's
>libsofia-sip-ua/su/strtoull.c is that it comes that way from the original
>contributors like University of California and Sun Microsystems. Whom legal
>writer counsel do you suggest to talk to ? UCB & Sun's or the Sofia-SIP
>upstream which code is licensed under LGPL ? I don't believe that that clause
>makes it non-free as of DFSG, but if you think otherwise, please express your
>points.
The "restricted rights" thing is just fine and free as far as the DFSG, IMHO, and
I've never heard anyone on debian-legal assert otherwise: the "restricted rights"
clause simply asserts that the US Government doesn't get any more rights than anyone
else.
The "restricted rights" thing might possibly be a GPL compatibility issue, but
I'd ask the FSF (www.gnu.org) what they think about that. I would guess not, but
what do I know.
----
Unfortunately, there are DFSG-freeness issues in the package.
>From COPYRIGHTS:
>The package also contains code derived from RFC 3174 (SHA1). The code is
>distributed with the following copyright notice by the Internet Society:
>
>Partly copyright (C) The Internet Society (2001). All Rights Reserved.
>
>This document [RFC3174] and translations of it may be copied and furnished
>to others, and derivative works that comment on or otherwise explain it or
>assist in its implementation may be prepared, copied, published and
...
This is a notorious problem. This is the RFC license, and it's non-free. It's
non-free because it only grants permission to make derivative works which
"comment on or otherwise explain it or assist in its implementation". To be
DFSG-free, it must grant permission to make derivative works in general, even if they
are for other purposes. In fact it explicitly prohibits other modifications. :-(
(In addition, the "Internet Society" copyright statement may well be false, if
the RFC was written in the US by authors not employed by the Internet Society.
The RFCs are unfortunately a nest of copyright incompetence.)
Perhaps the usage is small enough that the code is not really a derivative work
of RFC3174. If you're lucky. If not, there's probably an alternate SHA1 implementation
somewhere which doesn't use the RFC sample code, which could be substituted;
the actual cipher almost certainly qualifies as an uncopyrightable "fact".
----
All the other licenses are fine.
Joe Smith noted two without an explicit right to sell, but the IBM one grants the
right to "use in any way he or she deems fit", which I think is pretty definite
permission.
The other says "unrestricted use", which *probably* implies the right
to sell; I would contact Pekka Pessi and ask if that includes the right to sell.
If he says "yes", then I'd say it's fine.
--
Nathanael Nerode <neroden@fastmail.fm>
"(Instead, we front-load the flamewars and grudges in
the interest of efficiency.)" --Steve Lanagasek,
http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2005/09/msg01056.html
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