The BSD-3-Clause-Attribution license [1] has a term which reads:
Redistributions of any form whatsoever must retain the following
acknowledgment: 'This product includes software developed by <X>.'
where examples of <X> are:
the "Universidad de Palermo, Argentina"
(http://www.palermo.edu/) [1]
or
Computing Services at Carnegie Mellon University
(http://www.cmu.edu/computing/) [2]
As Fedora's wiki notes, this is "not to be confused with the
'advertising' clause found in older BSD license texts". [3] For
comparison, the classic advertising clause read [4]:
All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
software must display the following acknowledgement: This product
includes software developed by <X>
While the advertising clause has effects outside of the license block
text itself (i.e. "advertising materials" or "use of this software"),
the practical effect of the BSD-3-Clause-Attribution attribution clause
is only that you need to retain those two sentences in the license grant
block when redistributing. In other words, you need to keep the license
grant block verbatim.
Debian is, of course, doing that in debian/copyright. So this license, _by itself_, presents no practical problem for Debian.
Question at issue: Does this present a GPL incompatibility?The bug filer's position is "that BSD-3-Clause-Attribution is GPL-incompatible because it has a further restriction on distribution." [5]
My position is that it is not GPL-incompatible: not in theory and certainly not in practice.
The GPL prohibition on additional restrictions is clearly intended to prevent adding additional terms that restrict/burden someone from exercising the rights the GPL guarantees them. But this is not doing that. The GPL already requires people to keep various copyright statements and notices intact and it is well established that BSD clauses 1 & 2 requiring keeping copyright notices are GPL compatible.
In other words, everyone agrees it is okay to require retaining the following:
"Copyright <developer>"
There is no practical difference between that and being required to retain:
"This product includes software developed by <developer>."
They mean the same thing!
Again, this is NOT the advertising clause saying I have to put that
statement _somewhere else_ (in my advertising materials). This is just
saying I have to keep that license block verbatim.
Furthermore, courts are not robots blindly executing code. Seriously, can you imagine standing in court trying to argue to a judge that this distinction matters and somehow causes you damage‽
A position that this is GPL-incompatible will lead to significant effects. The library in question has ~7,500 binary reverse dependencies from ~4,500 source packages. Many of those will likely be GPL licensed.
"Sometimes the best approach to licensing is to take a defensible position and not to try and find problems."
- Sam Hartman on debian-legal recently [6]Note that there were other license concerns with this library. Some have already been resolved in Debian, 1 is resolved upstream by a PR from one of the Debian package maintainers (which can be pulled into Debian), and another has been resolved by me acquiring the consent that was requested. So this issue is the only remaining issue.
[1] https://spdx.org/licenses/BSD-3-Clause-Attribution.html[2] https://salsa.debian.org/debian/cyrus-sasl2/-/blob/master/debian/copyright#L331
[3] https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/BSD_with_Attribution [4] https://www.freebsd.org/copyright/license/ [5] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=1036113#44 [6] https://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2023/06/msg00021.html -- Richard
Attachment:
OpenPGP_signature
Description: OpenPGP digital signature