Bug#1033135: qt6-webengine: Remove old Unicode DFSG-non-free license
Source: qt6-webengine
Version: 6.4.2-final+dfsg-1
Severity: wishlist
Tags: upstream
Unicode produced a number of files years ago that contained a problematic license with the following restriction:
"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 free because it prevents the use of the file in ways that do not support the Unicode standard.
In 2004 Unicode relicensed their files under a different license that does not contain this restriction.
These is their current copyright and terms of use statement:
http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html
Which links to their current license:
https://www.unicode.org/license.txt
For many years, Chromium integrated an older copy of `Convert-UTF` with the problematic license. When the problem was brought to their attention they updated the file's license.
https://bugs.chromium.org/p/google-breakpad/issues/detail?id=270
https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/+/14bbefbd9600e08d6a34d7250faa8bc9dba2113e%5E%21/
qt6-webengine currently includes three other files that still contain this problematic license in their headers.
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_10-1998.ucm
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_11-2001.ucm
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_14-1998.ucm
Identical files (except for the licenses) are found in the Unicode GitHub repository:
https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4c/source/data/mappings
These were updated to the non-problematic license in 2015:
https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/ICU-22007
A copy of the bad license also appears in:
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/breakpad/breakpad/LICENSE
It needs to be removed, and, if breakpad uses the ICU files, replaced with the license at:
https://www.unicode.org/license.txt
This has been reported upstream at:
https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-112008
There is also a Lintian bug regarding the detection of this problematic license:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854209
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