[Date Prev][Date Next] [Thread Prev][Thread Next] [Date Index] [Thread Index]

Re: zlib specification license



On Thu, 10 May 2012 11:26:21 +0200 Simon Josefsson wrote:

> Hi,

Hi Simon!

> 
> Has this license been evaluated before?  RFC 1950-1952 contains:
> 
>    Copyright (c) 1996 L. Peter Deutsch and Jean-Loup Gailly
> 
>    Permission is granted to copy and distribute this document for any
>    purpose and without charge, including translations into other
>    languages and incorporation into compilations, provided that the
>    copyright notice and this notice are preserved, and that any
>    substantive changes or deletions from the original are clearly
>    marked.
> 
>    A pointer to the latest version of this and related documentation in
>    HTML format can be found at the URL
>    <ftp://ftp.uu.net/graphics/png/documents/zlib/zdoc-index.html>.
> 
> The license initially doesn't give permissions to make modifications,
> although it later require that any changes are clearly marked, which I
> guess can be seen as the intention is to allow modifications.
> 
> Is the license DFSG-free?

To me it's really unclear whether this license really wants to grant
permission to make modifications and redistribute the result.

Do I understand correctly that the RFC documents you are referring to
are related to the zlib library?
I think the copyright holders for these RFC documents should really be
persuaded to re-license them under the terms of the zlib license [1].
It is always recommendable that the documentation for a program or
library is released under the same licensing terms as the program or
library itself.

[1] http://www.zlib.net/zlib_license.html

I hope this re-licensing may happen soon...


-- 
 http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt
 New GnuPG key, see the transition document!
..................................................... Francesco Poli .
 GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82  3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE

Attachment: pgpA66w6K_VUL.pgp
Description: PGP signature


Reply to: