[jcifs] Licensing issues in jcifs package

[Michael B Allen]

On Wed, May 20, 2009 at 5:47 AM, Michal Vyskocil <mvyskocil at suse.cz> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I'm working on jcifs packages for SUSE. Our legal team found some licensing
> issues in source tarball you offer.
>
> 1.) examples/Format.java contains the following license:
> |  * All Rights Reserved.
> |  *
> |  * Permission to use, copy, modify, and distribute this
> |  * software and its documentation for NON-COMMERCIAL purposes
> |  * and without fee is hereby granted provided that this
> |  * copyright notice appears in all copies.
> |  *
> |  * THE AUTHORS AND PUBLISHER MAKE NO REPRESENTATIONS OR
> |  * WARRANTIES ABOUT THE SUITABILITY OF THE SOFTWARE, EITHER
> |  * EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE
> |  * IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A
> |  * PARTICULAR PURPOSE, OR NON-INFRINGEMENT. THE AUTHORS
> |  * AND PUBLISHER SHALL NOT BE LIABLE FOR ANY DAMAGES SUFFERED
> |  * BY LICENSEE AS A RESULT OF USING, MODIFYING OR DISTRIBUTING
> |  * THIS SOFTWARE OR ITS DERIVATIVES.
> |  */
>
> and this is not an opensource license [1] and I removed it from tarball.
>
> 2.) examples/SmbShell.java depends on Format.java. This might be a problem,
> because GPL code cannot depends on GPL incompatible one - so I removed it from
> our tarball too.

Ok. Yeah, those are just examples so you can safely delete them. In
fact, I have just deleted Format.java and SmbShell.java in my local
copy. It should be updated in the next release which should actually
be in a week or two.

> 3.) GPLv [2] (point 6) and LGPL [3] (point 10) says that you need to
> distribute a copy of license with a Program, so please include them to the
> archive.
>
> [1] http://opensource.org/docs/osd
> [2] http://opensource.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.php
> [3] http://opensource.org/licenses/lgpl-2.1.php

I do not really interpret section 10 in that way but regardless every
source package should definitely include a LICENSE.txt file. I'm not
sure why JCIFS didn't have one. I think maybe our package description
dropped it. Anyway I have placed a copy of the LGPL 2.1 as LICENSE.txt
into my local copy. It will go out in the next release.

Thanks,
Mike

-- 
Michael B Allen
Java Active Directory Integration
http://www.ioplex.com/