On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 12:12 +0100, Robin Cornelius wrote:
> Dear mentors,
>
> I am looking for a sponsor for my package "xmlrpc-epi".
Copyright issues:
1. The machine-interpretable copyright format is meant to be
hierarchical - Files: * should not appear before any other more specific
matches. i.e. exclude all the awkward files explicitly in turn, then the
last stanza is "everything else".
2. expat - debian/copyright quotes this as being dual-licenced MPL or
GPL but does not note that the expat code itself is neither compiled nor
distributed in the Debian package, only in the upstream source. (It may
be an idea to see if upstream would consider splitting it into a
separate source tarball.) The problem is that GPL-2+ code cannot be
compiled into (or linked against) a shared library that also includes
code under the PHP licence and although the build does not do that, it
also does not state that the expat code is not actually packaged. (The
MPL is also incompatible with the GPL but that isn't a problem in your
case. I must admit, I'm not sure if the MPL is compatible with the PHP
licence.)
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
3. PHP-licenced code in a shared library. In effect, your package cannot
be used by (i.e. linked against) any GPL code because it contains code
under a licence that is not compatible with the GPL. That is a
potential minefield for other packages wanting to use your library and
needs to be spelt out in debian/copyright.
All content relevant to these issues must be in debian/copyright -
content anywhere else in the package will be ignored as far as
acceptance by the ftp-masters is concerned. IMHO, that includes some
statement that expat/* is not compiled or packaged for Debian and that
there would be problems combining the expat/* code with the src/* code
(which is why I find it strange that the two are packaged together).
For the benefit of the list, the current package includes code under the
following licence statements:
Files: debian/*
Copyright: (C) 2007 Paul Hampson <Paul.Hampson@Pobox.com>
(C) 2007-2008 Robin Cornelius <robin.cornelius@gmail.com>
Licence: MIT
Files: *
Copyright: (C) 2000 Epinions, Inc.
Licence: MIT
(probably actually refers to Files: src/* except the ones excluded below
- and that exclusion should be above this wildcard.)
Files: src/expat_compat.h src/compat.c
Copyright: (C) 1997-2007 The PHP Group
Licence: PHP-3.01
(src/compat.c is part of the packaged library as it is listed in
src/Makefile.am under libxmlrpc_epi_la_SOURCES. src/expat_compat.h is
not packaged in the -dev)
Files: expat/*
Copyright: (C) 1998, 1999 James Clark
Licence: Mozilla Public License Version 1.1 or GNU General Public
License
(files not packaged, code not compiled)
Files: scripts/cvs2cl.pl
Copyright: (C) 1999 Karl Fogel <kfogel@red-bean.com>
Licence: GPL-2+
(build tool? Robin? seems to be an upstream thing - again worth asking
upstream not to package it in the released tarball).
Quite a collection.
So that we don't get a REFUSED with this one, I think I'd like some
feedback from other sponsors about how to phrase debian/copyright such
that the situation is both clear and legal. Users of this library must
be clear on what licences can and cannot be used for code that links
against it. To me, the presence of code under the PHP licence within the
shared library itself means that the library isn't GPL-compatible and
this should be explicit in debian/copyright IMHO.
See also http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=413986
Sorry, Robin, there's work to do on this package yet.
(On a better note, I've just got my laptop back from repair {new
motherboard} and it's working fine - thanks for all your help with
that!) :-)
--
Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part