[Fedora-legal-list] Tanukiwrapper license

[Miroslav Suchý]

Hi Fedora legals,
I would like to ask you if you can help me and Leif from Tanukisoftware.

They had some modification to GPLv2 which make their product
Tanukiwrapper non-free. It was reviewed here year ago:
http://www.mail-archive.com/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/msg00253.html
Their motivation is stated below.
If you can help him to clear the license, I will be very glad.

Please cc in reply Leif as he is not subscribed to this mailing list.

I would say (but IANAL) that best solution is to release it under GPLv2
*and* MIT license and state that all files are licensed under GPLv2, but
files foo and directory bar, which are licensed under MIT (Leif can you
state which parts are under MIT?).
However, I'm not sure how to enforce presence of startup banner in license.

Thanks in advance
  Miroslav Suchy


-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: Java Service Wrapper
Date: Mon, 15 Aug 2011 16:03:05 +0900
From: Leif Mortenson <leif.mortenson at tanukisoftware.com>
To: Miroslav Suchý <msuchy at redhat.com>

Miroslav,
Thank you for your quick reply.  Searing, I found you old email.  My
sincere apologies for letting that slip through the cracks.

The changes we made in the Community License were simply to add that
we wanted our startup banner to remain, and to include required
references to a 3rd party MIT license.  There was no intention to
cause any problems or make it incompatible with GPL2.

If you could please put me in touch with your legal team as you
originally offered, I would be happy to work with them to get this
resolved ASAP.

Sincerely,
Leif Mortenson
Tanuki Software, Ltd.

2011/8/15 Miroslav Suchý <msuchy at redhat.com>:
> On 08/15/2011 05:04 AM, Leif Mortenson wrote:
>> Miroslav,
>> I am with Tanuki Software, the company which owns and develops the
>> Java Service Wrapper.    Recently a fork of a very old version of the
>> Wrapper was made without changing the name of the project.  This is
>> very confusing to our customers and we have been unsuccessfully trying
>> to get in touch with them about changing the name they are using.
>> https://bitbucket.org/ivertex
>>
>> It appears that you are working on adding this to your Fedora project.
>>  We are hoping to get this resolved with a simple name change.  Once
>> that is done I would like to avoid causing you or your users any
>
> I'm afraid that I can do very little about it. The package name in
> Fedora should match upstream. And that is "Java service wrapper".
> So please talk to ivertex - the upstream maintainer.
>
>> problems or confusion with the package being renamed.  I would
>
> Future rename in Fedora is without problem.
>
>> If you would like to get an official Java Service Wrapper into Fedora,
>> the Community edition is GPL2 and we would be happy to work with you
>> if any changes are needed to make it ready to be a package.
>
> Well you can. In fact I tried to get original Tanukiwrapper into Fedora,
> but I had legal problem. You distribute it under GPLv2 plus your own
> license prefix, which make it effectively non-free.
>
> I sent emails to info at tanukisoftware.com, sales at tanukisoftware.com and
> support at tanukisoftware.com following email.
>
>> Hi,
>> I would like to maintain and package Tanukiwrapper for Fedora. It has
>> been there in past, but has been orphaned recently and is not present in
>> last Fedora 14.
>> Last packaged version is 3.2.3, which has been released under BSD license.
>> I would like to pack latest greatest version of community version of
>> Tanukiwrapper, but I find some problems with wording of "Community
>> License Agreement" (CLA).
>>
>> Your changes to GPLv2 make the CLA non-free license, which is probably
>> not intended.
>>
>> You may take a look at quick Fedora review at:
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/legal@lists.fedoraproject.org/msg00253.html
>>
>> May I ask you to change the text of license? I see several possibilities:
>> 1) Either by dropping your prefix of GPLv2 and make it GPLv2 only,
>> 2) or by available as GPLv2 or some license of your own (so I use is
>> under GPLv2 only)
>> 3) or reword your CLA and clear up the term "Product" and put back "How
>> to Apply" section. Other actions may be needed, I'm not lawyer, but I
>> can get you in touch with somebody from Fedora Legals.
>
> I very strongly believe that this fork happened because of this legal
> problem. And if you help to resolve it, so the Tanukiwrapper will be
> re-distributable again, then there will be no reason for the fork.
>
> --
> Miroslav Suchy
> Red Hat Satellite Engineering

-- 
Leif Mortenson
Tanuki Software, Ltd.
6-16-7-1001 Nishi-Kasai, Edogawa-ku
Tokyo 134-0088 Japan
Tel: +81-3-3878-3211
Fax: +81-3-3878-0313
http://www.tanukisoftware.com
leif.mortenson at tanukisoftware.com

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