[Denemo-devel] Licenses and copyrights

[Pietro Battiston]

Hello,

this mail is long and burocratic. Hence, I'm just listing here what I
_would_ do if I was in denemo developers, and I'll explain _why_ I would
do it below, so that if you agree with me you don't even have to read
the most bothering part...

1) On top of the README, add the following lines

    Denemo is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
    it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
    the Free Software Foundation, version 2.

    Denemo is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
    but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
    MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
    GNU General Public License for more details.

    You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
    along with Denemo; if not, write to the Free Software
    Foundation, Inc., 51 Franklin St, Fifth Floor, Boston, MA 02110-1301
    USA

2) 
a) replace, in denemo.ttf, the mention of this "free public license"
with a mention of the OFL
b) at the beginning of LICENSE_OFL, write "denemo.ttf was derived from
font Musi{appropriate suffix}; what follows is the Mus{appropriate
suffix} license.

3) on top of m4/alsa.m4 and m4/binreloc.m4, add (respectively)

Copyright © 1998 Jarsolav Kysela <address@hidden>
Copyright © 2005 Hongli Lai <address@hidden>

and state that they are distributable as LGPL 2.1+.

4) In denemo-manual.html, replace 
"This Manual is released under the Creative Commons License, this manual
may be quoted, and freely distributed as long as credit is given in
written form to http://www.denemo.org. If it is placed on a web page a
link to the denemo site should also appear."

with

"This Manual is released under the <a
href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/";>Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported</a> license."

Thanks (or... follow reading)

Pietro Battiston


---------------8<---------------8<---------------8<---------------8<
BOTHERING PART

For 1)

File denemo.ttf's status is unclear. Inside it, I see

"Copyright (c) 2001 by Robert Allgeyer. Free public license.
Re-ordered for denemo (c) Richard Shann 2007"

The only license that has "free public license" in the name (I know of)
is the Aladdin free public license, but it's really not a very used
one...  should it mean "General public license"?!

This wouldn't solve the problem, though, since in the folder "fonts",
there is a file LICENSE_OFL which states


"LICENSE FOR FONTS MusiQwik, MusiQwikB, MusiSync."

and then

"This Font Software is licensed under the SIL Open Font License, Version
1.1".

Now, I imagine that denemo.ttf derives from one of the 3, but it's not
stated anywhere. Notice however that a font under the OFL can be
modified, but the new font _must_ be released under the OFL.

For 2)

denemo doesn't really declare its license status anywhere (except in
denemo.spec which is a distribution-specific file, where I would never
look for it and where it may be interpreted as a distribution-specific
clause). There is COPYING, but formally this is probably not enough (see
for instance [0]), and more pragmatically it doesn't tell me if I should
consider denemo as GPL 2 or GPL 2+ (as one would expect that a GNU
software is!).


For 3)
m4/alsa.m4 and m4/binreloc.m4 have an unspecified legal status: could
you state in their header that they are respectively Copyright © 1998
Jarsolav Kysela <address@hidden> and Copyright © 2005 Hongli Lai
<address@hidden>, and are distributed as LGPL 2.1+ (as they are part
of softwares - alsa-lib and autopackage - distributed with this
license)?

By the way, as far as I know alsa.m4 is useless if you have libasound2
development files installed - and you have to in order to build - but
I'm really not expert in the field.


For 4)
doc/denemo-manual.html states it is released under _the_ "Creative
Commons License", which I'm afraid is something doesn't exist. May I ask
you to clarify which version of the license must be assumed? If you
don't have a clear opinion, I strongly suggest that 3.0 by-sa ([1]) is
adopted, and that the "clauses" that follow are removed, since they
contradict the license (or they are useless, depending on what license
you choose and/or what meaning you give to the words "quoted",
"placed").
Notice that depending on you choosing some specific another version of
the Creative Commons, I may have to remove the file from the debian
package (see [2]).


[0]:
http://forum.soft32.com/linux/GPL2-GPL3-issue-VDR-plug-packages-ftopict432781.html
(msg 4, second paragraph) 
[1]:
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
[2]:
http://wiki.debian.org/DFSGLicenses#CreativeCommonsAttributionShare-Alike.28CC-BY-SA.29v3.0

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