[Fedora-legal-list] IBPP License

[Tom Callaway]

On 08/21/2012 05:52 AM, Michal Minář wrote:
> Hello,
> I'd like to package a wt toolkit [1], which bundles also IBPP [2]
> library, that is
> licensed under IBPP license. Could you please check, whether this is
> acceptable
> license for Fedora project?
> 
> --------------------------- LICENSE TEXT
> ----------------------------------------------
> IBPP License v1.1
> -----------------
> 
> (C) Copyright 2000-2006 T.I.P. Group S.A. and the IBPP Team (www.ibpp.org)
> 
> Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person or organization
> ("You") obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files
> covered by this license (the "Software") to use the Software as part of
> another
> work; to modify it for that purpose; to publish or distribute it,
> modified or
> not, for that same purpose; to permit persons to whom the other work
> using the
> Software is furnished to do so; subject to the following conditions: the
> above
> copyright notice and this complete and unmodified permission notice shall be
> included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software; You will not
> misrepresent modified versions of the Software as being the original.
> 
> The Software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or
> implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability,
> fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement.  In no event shall
> the authors or copyright holders be liable for any claim, damages or other
> liability, whether in an action of contract, tort or otherwise, arising
> from,
> out of or in connection with the software or the use of other dealings in
> the Software.

This is an odd MIT variant, specifically, because it says "for that
purpose" and "for that same purpose", which limits what would normally
be broad grants in the standard BSD license to be limited to 'purpose'
of 'us[ing] the Software as part of another work'. Even if the "for that
purpose" wording was removed, the use grant is limited to use of the
"Software as part of another work".

Red Hat Legal advises that these restrictions make the IBPP license
Non-Free.

It might be worthwhile to ask the upstream for IBPP if they would be
willing to simply relicense it with the standard MIT license (or grant
permission for Fedora to distribute IBPP under the terms of the standard
MIT license).

http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT

~tom

==
Fedora Project