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
