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Bug#854209: More general problem than just with convert_UTF



I was looking at Lintian’s source code to prepare a patch that would correct 
these false positives and I realized that Lintian doesn’t actually check for 
the presence of the problematic license at all.  Rather, it was checking for 
some text that appears at the bottom of convert_UTF.  Probably because they 
were worried that the words in the license file were too common and they didn’t 
want false-positives (which is what they ended up with anyway).

So, I corrected the check to actually look for the problematic license and 
then ran the patched version against the qtwebengine-opensource-src package, 
which is one of the packages that had the false positive.  This removed the 
false positive, but I was surprised to find that it discovered four other 
affected files in the package.

E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/
3rdparty/chromium/third_party/breakpad/breakpad/LICENSE]
E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/
3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_10-1998.ucm]
E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/
3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_11-2001.ucm]
E: qtwebengine-opensource-src source: license-problem-convert-utf-code [src/
3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_14-1998.ucm]

One of these is a summary license file, but the other three are data files that 
contain the problematic license in their headers.

This made me start to wonder how many other files in Debian also have the 
problematic license that have gone undetected because the Lintian check was 
not well formatted.

In the case of these files it is possible, perhaps even likely, that Unicode 
also relicensed them under a DFSG-free license at some point.  I am going to 
work with upstream to determine if that was the case and, if so, correct the 
license.  Otherwise, I will work with upstream to see if there is some DFSG 
alternative to these files.

Given the fact that this license extends beyond the convert_UTF file, I am 
planning on amending my patch to rename the check to something more generic, 
like license-problem-unicode and updating the description of the tag.

For anyone coming to this bug report with questions about the status of a 
particular Unicode license, the problematic license contains the following 
statement:

> Unicode, Inc. hereby grants the right to freely use the information
> supplied in this file in the creation of products supporting the
> Unicode Standard

This is not DFSG-free because it restricts the users from using the source 
code in ways that do not support the Unicode standard.  This phrase does not 
exist in the license that Unicode adopted later and which they relicensed 
their files to use.

-- 
Soren Stoutner
soren@stoutner.com

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