| Glenn Maynard 2004-07-28, 6:23 pm |
| On Tue, Jul 27, 2004 at 07:48:25PM -0600, Neal Richter wrote:
> I looked into the state of advertising clauses in HtDig 3.1.6, they only
> exist in the Berkeley DB directory (which Debian's build/package excludes
> by linking against a libdb library) and all of them are "Regents of U of
> C" which was stricken from the license recently. So we're kosher ;-)
>
> In the current HtDig 3.2b6 (LGPL License) a problematic file is
> htlib/strptime.cc:
> 20 * 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of this
> 21 * software must display the following acknowledgement:
> 22 * This product includes software developed by Powerdog Industries.
>
> This file was removed 2 years ago from the 3.1.x branch (strptime isn't
> even called in 3.1.6). I'm not sure why it wasn't removed from the 3.2 Branch.
>
> It's only called once other than it's own internal recursive calls.
>
> I'll either kill it, move to a different version or ask Powerdog to give us a 3-clause license.
Thanks for looking into this.
> If none of that works then we could amend our version of the LGPL License.
> This may be advantageous anyway since it allows us to use NetBSD, OpenBSD,
> FreeBSD code.... all organizations very unlikely to pull a SCO on anyone.
> ;-)
I hope so, but evil lurks in all man (or at least that's the only safe
assumption) ... 
> Just curious... are there any other examples other than OpenSSL where
> Debian amended the GPL or LGPL? Do you have a general policy discouraging
> 4-clause BSD Lics (effectively eliminating using *BSD code)?
Well, I believe OpenSSL showed up as a problem well after lots of GPL
code was making use of it, at which point we cursed a bit and started
seeking exceptions. Cases of widespread license incompatibility like
this aren't too common; most of the time there's another library we can
drop in and make the problem go away.
I think a lot of us don't like advertising clauses. (As well as the FSF's
reasons, I don't like avoidable GPL-incompatibility.) They're definitely
permitted by the DFSG, though.
--
Glenn Maynard
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