On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:32:20 +0100, Carsten Munk <[email protected]> wrote:
> 2010/11/22 Zhu, Peter J <[email protected]>:
> > Hi
> >
> >> -----Original Message-----
> >> From: [email protected]
> >> [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Carsten Munk
> >> Sent: Monday, November 22, 2010 3:42 PM
> >> To: [email protected]
> >> Subject: [meego-packaging] Licensing on spec files
> >>
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I've noticed we're getting more and more packages that has closed
> >> source licenses on the packaging itself. This is problematic as
> >> technically, we don't have rights to build those packages within MeeGo
> >> and probably even publish the source rpms on repo.meego.com and others
> >> to mirror our repos.
> >>
> > Give an example
>
> As an example of recently submitted packages (but not accepted) - if
> you read this license in the top of the spec file(s), it is clearly
> not open source.
>
> The content of the spec file, gst-plugins-va.spec:
> ===================================================================
> # Copyright 2010 Intel Corporation All Rights Reserved.
> # The source code contained or described herein and all documents
> related to the source code ("Material") are owned by Intel Corporation
> or its suppliers or licensors. Title to the Material remains with
> Intel Corporation or its suppliers and licensors. The Material
> contains trade secrets and proprietary and confidential information of
> Intel or its suppliers and licensors. The Material is protected by
> worldwide copyright and trade secret laws and treaty provisions. No
> part of the Material may be used, copied, reproduced, modified,
> published, uploaded, posted, transmitted, distributed, or disclosed in
> any way without Intel’s prior express written permission.
> #
> # No license under any patent, copyright, trade secret or other
> intellectual property right is granted to or conferred upon you by
> disclosure or delivery of the Materials, either expressly, by
> implication, inducement, estoppel or otherwise. Any license under such
> intellectual property rights must be express and approved by Intel in
> writing.
Wow. Impressive. And almost certainly a mistake.
This is standard boilerplate for Intel software outside of the open
source team...
We should fix that :-)
> >> I don't know what the policy should be - frankly, I'd either prefer
> >> 'no license' like most of our spec files, or a general statement that
> >> our packaging (not content) is open source.
> >>
> > What do you mean by "no license"?
>
> Right now our spec files are quite plain, with no license header in
> the top, like in:
>
> #specfile originally created for Fedora, modified for Moblin Linux
> Summary: Access control list utilities
> Name: acl
> Version: 2.2.49
> Release: 1
> BuildRoot: %{_tmppath}/%{name}-%{version}-%{release}-root-%(%{__id_u} -n)
> BuildRequires: libattr-devel >= 2.4.1
> BuildRequires: autoconf, libtool >= 1.5, gettext, gawk
> Source:
> http://download.savannah.gnu.org/releases-noredirect/acl/acl-%{version}.src.tar.gz
> Patch0: acl-2.2.49-multilib.patch
> Patch1: acl-2.2.49-build.patch
> Patch6: acl-2.2.49-CVE-2009-4411.patch
>
> License: GPLv2
> Group: System/Base
> URL: http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/
>
>
> >> Could distribution engineers/architects elaborate on this topic and
> >> set forth a policy?
>
> Given that some of our specs are big enough to be actually
> copyrightable, they should really contain a license header stating the
> license and copyright owner.. The principle is usually that by
> default, you do not have a license for a copyrighted work, it is
> granted to you through a license (like BSD licensing, GPL, or what's
> above as a Intel closed source license).
Yes, they should have a clarifying licensing text under an open source
license. Let's keep it short (since this will be duplicated over and
over again) and make it one of the widely accepted ones. My guess is
that BSD would be appropriate here, but I'll leave that to the
experts...
/D
--
Dirk Hohndel
Intel Open Source Technology Center
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