Re: zlib specification license
Francesco Poli <invernomuto@paranoici.org> writes:
> 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.
Thanks for analysis.
> Do I understand correctly that the RFC documents you are referring to
> are related to the zlib library?
Yes. These RFCs are included in the upstream zlib tarball, which is
shipped together with some source packages in Debian (i.e., libereoffice
and qt4-x11). The zlib source package in Debian does not contain the
files though.
> 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...
Me too.
/Simon
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