Copyright for Netscape Plugin SDK
(for those of you just joining us, I am investigating packaging the GPL Flash
library and applications for Debian. See http://www.swift-tools.com/Flash)
On Tue, May 01, 2001 at 09:03:38AM +0100, Robert McQueen wrote:
> To be honest I was just trying to get round to changing it to an RFP,
> so I have no objections to you taking it over. I havn't done much beyond
> getting it to build, because I don't understand how dpkg handles shared
> libs. When I do, I can find some other package with a lib. (it looks
> like isfree, which I'm packaging now, will end up with a shlib anyway,
> so a nice intro... =)
Did you do any research on the copyright? I notice that several of the files
in the Plugin/ subdirectory appear to have come from the Netscape Plugin SDK,
and contain the following copyright notice:
* Copyright (c) 1996 Netscape Communications Corporation. All rights reserved.
I'm CCing the author and debian-legal to try to get this resolved.
Is it legal to include these source files in a free software package? Is it
even legal to redistribute them? I downloaded the SDK from:
http://home.netscape.com/comprod/development_partners/plugin_api/
which gives no mention of copyright or license. I looked through the tarball
for the "Unix LiveConnect/Plug-in SDK" (unix-sdk-3.0b5.tar.Z) and found
the following files corresponding to those in the Flash distribution:
cb450d9b66cb7bb1eecf13aa66c8362c PluginSDK30b5/include/jri.h
cb450d9b66cb7bb1eecf13aa66c8362c flash-0.4.10/Plugin/jri.h
37d4582dffe367807db7583adf018e86 PluginSDK30b5/include/jri_md.h
37d4582dffe367807db7583adf018e86 flash-0.4.10/Plugin/jri_md.h
65c3a36f66d5e5f9908b46b72c0ced8d PluginSDK30b5/include/jritypes.h
65c3a36f66d5e5f9908b46b72c0ced8d flash-0.4.10/Plugin/jritypes.h
f24068f1f21c45dd9e60dae3a546bf90 PluginSDK30b5/include/npapi.h
f24068f1f21c45dd9e60dae3a546bf90 flash-0.4.10/Plugin/npapi.h
22c95ae864588aae5a7f8d842a01cc31 PluginSDK30b5/include/npupp.h
22c95ae864588aae5a7f8d842a01cc31 flash-0.4.10/Plugin/npupp.h
d0e163291e1a9a83f533fabcb98ea3c0 PluginSDK30b5/common/npunix.c
d0e163291e1a9a83f533fabcb98ea3c0 flash-0.4.10/Plugin/npunix.c
In addition, flash-0.4.10/Plugin/plugin.c appears to be a modified version of
PluginSDK30b5/examples/simple/Source/npsimple.c, which carries the same "All
rights reserved" copyright.
Does anyone know of a license document from Netscape regarding use of these
files? They are obviously intended to be used in third-party plugins, but
their copyright doesn't seem to allow it.
--
- mdz
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