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licencing troubles


There's been some controversy over in the OpenBSD world about
licensing recently, and so I did a quick sweep over the glibc sources
to see if the troublesome phrase was there too.

I found the following files:

libc/libio/filedoalloc.c
libc/libio/wfiledoalloc.c
libc/stdlib/random.c
libc/stdlib/random_r.c
libc/sysdeps/mach/hurd/net/if_ppp.h
libc/sysdeps/mach/sys/reboot.h
libc/sysdeps/unix/sysv/linux/net/if_ppp.h
libc/sysdeps/vax/htonl.s
libc/sysdeps/vax/htons.s

All these have a license of the form

/*
 * Copyright (c) 1990 The Regents of the University of California.
 * All rights reserved.
 *
 * Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
 * provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
 * duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation,
 * advertising materials, and other materials related to such
 * distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed
 * by the University of California, Berkeley.  The name of the
 * University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived
 * from this software without specific prior written permission.
 * THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
 * IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
 * WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
 */

except that if_ppp.h is copyright CMU not UCB.

I'm not sure where this license comes from; most of this source seems
to have come into the tree from somewhere else.  The problem is caused
by the first part of the second paragraph.  In other licenses (as in
4.4BSD), it reads:

          Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or
          without modification, are permitted provided that the
          following conditions are met:

Notice the 'with or without modification'?

At least some authors did this intentionally, because they did not
want modified versions of their code floating around.  For instance,
tcpwrappers was under this form of licence.

We need to clarify this because (a) the code has been modified, so we
might be breaking the license, and (b) if it can't be modified it
shouldn't be part of a free software project.

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@geoffk.org>


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