Hi debian-legal, While helping with a license audit of the largely LGPL'ed project ROOT (message CC'ed to project contacts), I happened to notice that the license for source package krb5, from which the ROOT source uses some code, contains the following clauses:
----- Export of this software from the United States of America may require a specific license from the United States Government. It is the responsibility of any person or organization contemplating export to obtain such a license before exporting. WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT, permission to [do standard MIT license things] is hereby granted, provided that [standard MIT license requirements are obeyed.] ----- (The full license is attached.) I know there have been numerous discussions about export restrictions as they relate to DFSG-freeness before, but I was surprisingly unable to find one about this particular license. The first paragraph excerpted above, if it were by itself, would seem harmless to me because it is a legal no-op: it is just an advisory notice, not a requirement of the license. What puzzles me are the words "WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT". Is that phrase sufficient to cause US export restrictions to be incorporated into the license? My understanding is that if so, it would not be DFSG-free, and also not GPL- or LGPL-compatible. If "WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT" does *not* cause US export restrictions to be incorporated, then what (if anything) is the semantic content of those three words? Thanks in advance, -- Kevin B. McCarty <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Physics Department WWW: http://www.princeton.edu/~kmccarty/ Princeton University GPG: public key ID 4F83C751 Princeton, NJ 08544
Copyright Notice and Legal Administrivia ---------------------------------------- Copyright (C) 1985-2006 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. All rights reserved. Export of this software from the United States of America may require a specific license from the United States Government. It is the responsibility of any person or organization contemplating export to obtain such a license before exporting. WITHIN THAT CONSTRAINT, permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose and without fee is hereby granted, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of M.I.T. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. Furthermore if you modify this software you must label your software as modified software and not distribute it in such a fashion that it might be confused with the original MIT software. M.I.T. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty. THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. Individual source code files are copyright MIT, Cygnus Support, OpenVision, Oracle, Sun Soft, FundsXpress, and others. Project Athena, Athena, Athena MUSE, Discuss, Hesiod, Kerberos, Moira, and Zephyr are trademarks of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). No commercial use of these trademarks may be made without prior written permission of MIT. "Commercial use" means use of a name in a product or other for-profit manner. It does NOT prevent a commercial firm from referring to the MIT trademarks in order to convey information (although in doing so, recognition of their trademark status should be given).
