Stardict and unspecified legal issues

[Peter Lemenkov]

Hello.

The stardict project was recently removed from SF due to unspecified
legal issues. In fact it was moved to Google Code, which was very
surprising to me, because I can hardly imagine a legal issue valid on
SF but invalid on Google Code.

Anyway, keeping in mind that the project owners claimed that "the
legal issues may never have been resolved" I think it's time to
reconsider whether we can ship it or not.

* http://stardict.sourceforge.net/
* http://code.google.com/p/stardict-3/

[Karl Goetz]

On Sat, 9 Jul 2011 08:49:55 +0400
Peter Lemenkov  wrote:
> Hello.
>
> The stardict project was recently removed from SF due to unspecified
> legal issues. In fact it was moved to Google Code, which was very
> surprising to me, because I can hardly imagine a legal issue valid on
> SF but invalid on Google Code.
>
> Anyway, keeping in mind that the project owners claimed that "the
> legal issues may never have been resolved" I think it's time to
> reconsider whether we can ship it or not.
> http://stardict.sourceforge.net/
> http://code.google.com/p/stardict-3/

I'm not involved in fedora, i'm just commenting based on a checkout
from google code above.

* main licence listed as GPL3+

* Some files have copyright notices before 2007 which is when GPL3 was
  released - i didn't search the 'net to try and find references to the
  listed author authorising a latter licence.
  (eg dict/tests/t_fuzzy.cpp dict/tests/t_dict_client.cpp)

* A file appears to be CPL, which the wiki says is not GPL compatible
  [1]. I didn't check if this file is built in or not.
  (eg dict/stardict-plugins/stardict-wordnet-plugin/tenis.h )

* Some files appears to have no licence, i don't   know if if it is
  assumed to be under the main licence or not. 
  (eg dict/src/sigc++config/sigc++config.h dict/src/sigc++/signal.h)

* Following on from that point, lots of files (without copyright
  notices) say they are generated. From what? signal.h above is an
  example.

[1] http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main#Good_Licenses

A close examination would probably show more, i found that lot by
running the licencecheck script (in debian - does fedora have one?) and
double checking the file headers.

thanks,
kk

[Tom Callaway]

On 07/09/2011 12:49 AM, Peter Lemenkov wrote:
> Hello.
>
> The stardict project was recently removed from SF due to unspecified
> legal issues. In fact it was moved to Google Code, which was very
> surprising to me, because I can hardly imagine a legal issue valid on
> SF but invalid on Google Code.
>
> Anyway, keeping in mind that the project owners claimed that "the
> legal issues may never have been resolved" I think it's time to
> reconsider whether we can ship it or not.
> http://stardict.sourceforge.net/
> http://code.google.com/p/stardict-3/

If memory serves, the issue with stardict was with some (all?) of its
dictionaries being of extremely dubious origins (e.g. stolen from
non-free sources), not the code itself.

~tom

==
Fedora Project