Bug#1004199: rubberband-cli: BSD-4-clause GPL-incompatible (but is it really still 4-clause?)
Package: rubberband-cli
Version: 2.0.0-2
Severity: important
Hello and thanks for maintaining this interesting package.
By reading its [debian/copyright] file, I see that the majority of
the source is released under GPL-2+, but some part of the package is
under different licenses, most notably:
[...]
| Files: src/getopt/*
| Copyright: 2000, The NetBSD Foundation, Inc
| 1987-1994, The Regents of the University of California
| License: BSD-4-clause
[...]
This license includes the infamous "obnoxious advertising clause"
(OAC), which is well known to be incompatible with GPL-2 and GPL-3 .
[debian/copyright]: <https://tracker.debian.org/media/packages/r/rubberband/copyright-2.0.0-2>
Hence, it seems that the package is legally undistributable,
assuming that src/getopt/* gets linked with any part under GPL-2+ ...
This sounds as very bad news.
However, does the BSD-4-clause license really apply to src/getopt/* ?
The copyright holders seem to be
* the Regents of the University of California, which have dropped
the OAC back in 1999, as per their public [^statement]
[^statement]: use
"wget ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change";
to get a copy
* and The NetBSD Foundation, Inc, which have dropped the OAC (along
with the no-endorsement clause) back in 2008, as stated on the
[website]
[website]: <https://www.netbsd.org/about/redistribution.html#why2clause>
As a consequence, I wonder whether src/getopt/* can already be considered
effectively relicensed under BSD-3-clause...
Please investigate with upstream and update the debian/copyright file,
once the situation is clarified.
Thanks for your time and dedication!
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