Re: Sofia SIP COPYRIGHTS
On Thursday 15 June 2006 21:53, Michael Poole wrote:
> George Danchev writes:
> > Hello -legal,
> >
> > I'm currently packaging sofia-sip.org SIP User Agent library which is
> > licensed under LGPL [1]. There is also a large file populated with
> > several copyrights [2] related to the code as used and distributed by the
> > some of the library files. I did not spot any brutal non-DFSG issues, but
> > since it is large and complex I'd like to read some opinions from any
> > sharp eyed criticists. However I'm a little bit puzzled by the
> > "Restricted Rights" as mentioned within the paragraph pasted below [3]
> > when it comes to GOVERNMENT USE and DoD usages ?
>
> That kind of clause is generally used with proprietary COTS software
> to make it clear that the government did not pay for the development
> of the software and does not get "Unlimited rights" to it per
> 252.227-7013(b)(1).
>
> For example, when a project enters a new phase and a different
> contractor wins the phase than who won the previous phase, the
> government can give copies of "Unlimited rights" works to the new
> contract winner. This helps the government get a little more mileage
> from its money and alleviates contractor "lock-in" for the life of a
> project.
>
> I suspect the reason to include it in open source software is similar,
> ensuring that copyleft licenses keep effect when the government passes
> a copy of the covered software to another party. You would probably
> have to talk to the license writer's legal counsel to be 100% sure.
Michael,
Thanks for you clarifications. In fact there is similar jurisdical norm in my
country also I was not aware of till that moment.
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.
Another source of pain could be linking Sofia-SIP with OpenSSL (which is
optional by nice to have it there) and as suggested by Mark [1] it is safe to
have so called OpenSSL_exception [2]. So the question is - is it fine to link
LGPL (not GPL'ed) code with OpenSSL licensed code ? Otherwise I believe we
can have that OpenSSL exception with no worries.
[1]
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-voip-maintainers/2006-June/005018.html
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenSSL_exception
--
pub 4096R/0E4BD0AB 2003-03-18 <people.fccf.net/danchev/key pgp.mit.edu>
fingerprint 1AE7 7C66 0A26 5BFF DF22 5D55 1C57 0C89 0E4B D0AB
Reply to: