[Fedora-legal-list] CUPS scsi backend licensing issue

[Julius Davies]

Hi, Tim,

In this case I think it's fine!  Thanks so much for looking into this,
and especially for providing a great picture of the actual connections
between the binary files.  I see this "backend/scsi" executable really
does come from only scsi.c and scsi-linux.c.

$ objdump -D  -l cups-1.4.2/backend/scsi |  grep cups-1.4.2 | sort

/home/julius/cups/cups-1.4.2/backend/scsi.c:110
[etc....]
/home/julius/cups/cups-1.4.2/backend/scsi-linux.c:112
[etc....]


Sorry I opened the bug!  I opened the bug over at CUPS, and they
seemed to agree there was a problem, so that's why I opened it at
Fedora.  But now I see that it's fine.

Shall I close the bug?

yours,

Julius



On Wed, Feb 24, 2010 at 4:37 AM, Tim Waugh <twaugh at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I have some questions about how to proceed in the light of this reported
> licensing bug:
>  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=567854
>
> There is an upstream bug corresponding to it here:
>  http://cups.org/str.php?L3509
>
> The problem is that some of the source files in CUPS (all versions)
> include the BSD-With-Advertising license text in their headers, whereas
> CUPS as a whole is licensed as GPLv2 and LGPLv2 (but may link against
> OpenSSL).
>
> As noted in the Bugzilla bug report, the code cannot automatically be
> relicensed to remove the advertising clause.
>
> These files will be removed in a future version of CUPS (1.5.x), but the
> current stable series will continue to ship them.
>
> Here is the upstream response to STR #3509:
>
> ==>
> Well, since we are the copyright holder we can say that the BSD license
> in the SCSI backend sources is compatible, just as we say you can mix
> CUPS with OpenSSL - the CUPS license is GPL2+LGPL2+exceptions.
>
> In any case, since a) the SCSI backend is never used, b) we have removed
> it from CUPS trunk, and c) Linux distributors can always remove the SCSI
> backend from the list of legacy backends that are built and installed
> with the current releases of CUPS, I'm going to just dupe this bug
> against STR #3500.
> <==
>
> STR #3500 is the upstream bug report which caused these files to be
> removed on the trunk for the reason that they are no longer needed.
>
> What are these files?  The scsi.c, scsi-irix.c and scsi-linux.c files
> make up the 'scsi' CUPS backend, an executable which resides
> in /usr/lib/cups/backend and which the CUPS scheduler spawns in order to
> hand off jobs to SCSI printers.  It links against libcups.so.2, which is
> licensed as LGPLv2.
>
> ===
>
> So, the questions are:
>
> a) is this a problem?
>
> and
>
> b) if so is it sufficient for me to simply not ship the scsi backend in
> the cups binary package, or does the source tarball need to be re-spun
> for each new release to excise these BSD-licensed files?
>
> Thanks,
> Tim.
> */
>
>
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-- 
yours,

Julius Davies
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