Martin List-Petersen wrote:
Sam Geeraerts wrote:
Paul O'Malley wrote:
Markus Laire wrote:
Markus Laire wrote:
Brian said:
: One reading of this is: "Users may copy or modify Sun RPC without
: charge, but are not authorized to license or distribute it to anyone
: else except as part of a product or program developed by the user" -
: the second clause of the "or" can be ignored.
IMO the meaning of the license is clearly "Users may copy or modify
Sun RPC without charge, but are not authorized to license or
distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product developed
by the user or program developed by the user" (note the added text).
After thinking this a bit more I'm not so sure anymore whether it is
meant to mean "except as part of a (product) or (program developed
by the user)" or "except as part of a (product or program) developed
by the user"
In a case like this shouldn't gNS contact the copyright holder(s)
instead of deciding to interpret the license favorably for gNS?
Markus,
Your extract was not verbose enough to prove your case.
You should have started here:
---
Upstream Author: Wietse Venema
Copyright:
Most of the files, fall under the following copyright, and are
distributable
under the terms of the BSD license (/usr/share/common-licenses/BSD):
* Copyright (c) 1983,1991 The Regents of the University of California.
* All rights reserved.
Some of the RPC code, is copyrighted by Sun Microsystems, and is
provided under the following terms:
-----
This implies that the code is part of a product which Wietse has
licensed.
Licence is thus free!
That copyright summary was added by Debian. Looking at the original
source code [1] the only files that mention the (original) BSD license
are portmap.c and portmap.8. The former also contains the Sun RPC
restriction, as does from_local.c. The other files do not contain
license information, nor is there a COPYING file.
If there were a COPYING file, then I think the code that originally
fell under the (non-free) Sun RPC restriction would be (freely)
re-licensed by the user-developer who put the code together and there
would be no problem.
Right now, I think the only free code in there is portmap.c and
portmap.8.
So I think the copyright holders should be asked:
- what the license of every file is
- if the Sun RPC restriction still applies to anyone who wants to
distribute the code (and maybe clarify what the restriction actually
means)
If Debian has added the copyright summary, then that has been done based
on a request from the user-developer (Wietse). Again, in doubt as him
before trying to non-free it here.
Based on the information available, Brians decision is clear.
I respect the opinion of both Brian and the Debian community, as they
are probably more knowledgable about this kind of stuff then me.
However, that doesn't mean that I or anyone else has to accept their
word as the absolute truth, no questions asked. I am confused about this
bug's resolution, so I'm trying to weed out the details of it to
determine whether the resolution is wrong or whether I'm stupid.
While looking for the Debian maintainer of portmap to ask him about how
the COPYING file came to be, I found bug 424957 [1]. It seems that
Debian also has some serious concerns about the Sun RPC restriction.
[1] http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=424957
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