Hi,
This issue came up when trying to package rust-tiny-bip39 [1]. Basically there are some projects that are spun off of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP), in this case BIP39 [2] which establishes a wordlist which can be use as mnemonic to encode/decode a long series of bits. Te issue is that typically these BIPs are licensed [3], but (maybe) because BIP39 has not passed the proposed stage, it did not receive a proper license. So the question is, how to deal with the wordlist defined in BIP39?
Contacting the upstream developer is difficult as they don't have an open issue page, and the main means of external people to get in touch with them is through their google mailing list, which would require exposing my personal gmail account to who knows what (given the association with bitcoin), which I am not comfortable of doing. In Fedora there is another BIP39 based project, python-mnemonic [4], which is the reference code for BIP39, where the only license specified is MIT. I have looked at the review request ticket [5], but the licensing of BIP39 was not discussed there. Any advice on this situation?
[1]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2297307 [2]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0039.mediawiki [3]: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0002.mediawiki#bip-licensing [4]: https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/python-mnemonic [5]: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1395867
On Mon, Aug 5, 2024 at 10:38 AM Cristian Le fedora@lecris.me wrote:
Hi,
This issue came up when trying to package rust-tiny-bip39 [1]. Basically there are some projects that are spun off of Bitcoin Improvement Proposals (BIP), in this case BIP39 [2] which establishes a wordlist which can be use as mnemonic to encode/decode a long series of bits. Te issue is that typically these BIPs are licensed [3], but (maybe) because BIP39 has not passed the proposed stage, it did not receive a proper license. So the question is, how to deal with the wordlist defined in BIP39?
Contacting the upstream developer is difficult as they don't have an open issue page, and the main means of external people to get in touch with them is through their google mailing list, which would require exposing my personal gmail account to who knows what (given the association with bitcoin), which I am not comfortable of doing. In Fedora there is another BIP39 based project, python-mnemonic [4], which is the reference code for BIP39, where the only license specified is MIT. I have looked at the review request ticket [5], but the licensing of BIP39 was not discussed there. Any advice on this situation?
Sorry, I thought I had responded to this. If we assume that the creators of the word lists have copyright on the word lists, the lists apparently are in python-mnemonic under the MIT license and the author of the word lists there is one of the authors of BIP39. So I'd conclude from that that the word lists (which I assume are substantially the same in rust-tiny-bip39) are under the MIT license.
Richard
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Cristian Le -
Richard Fontana