563972 - New third party code for Tamarin

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(mozilla.org :: Licensing, task)

Description

[Simon Wilkinson]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-US) AppleWebKit/533.4 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/5.0.375.29 Safari/533.4
Build Identifier: 

We are considering bringing some third-party code into the Tamarin source tree which is not covered by the current licenses. It will eventually live in the directory other-licenses/win32cv.

Could you advise if the code's license is compatible?

The code is from this page:
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/win32-cv-1.html

And it's license appears to be here:
http://www.cs.wustl.edu/~schmidt/ACE-copying.html


Reproducible: Always

Comment 1

[Luis Villa [Outside Counsel; for non-law use [e-mail]]]

It would be good to contact the copyright holders and have them clarify the following sentence:

"[Y]ou may not do anything to the DOC software code [...] that will prevent DOC software from being distributed freely using an open-source development model."

The elided examples make me think that the author intends this to prevent misappropriation, which is fine, but we should attempt to resolve the ambiguity if we can.

Comment 2

[Simon Wilkinson]

(In reply to comment #1)
> It would be good to contact the copyright holders and have them clarify the
> following sentence:
> 
> "[Y]ou may not do anything to the DOC software code [...] that will prevent DOC
> software from being distributed freely using an open-source development model."
> 
> The elided examples make me think that the author intends this to prevent
> misappropriation, which is fine, but we should attempt to resolve the ambiguity
> if we can.

The copyright holder has updated the webpage to hopefully remove the ambiguity. The new wording is:

Note, however, that you may not misappropriate the DOC software code,
such as copyrighting it yourself or claiming authorship of the DOC
software code, in a way that will prevent DOC software from being
distributed freely using an open-source development model.

Comment 3

[Luis Villa [Outside Counsel; for non-law use [e-mail]]]

I'm OK with that, then. 

Gerv, does our copyright policy make it clear how to handle third-party copyrighted code like this? (i.e., what to do with pre-existing copyright headers, etc.?) I seem to recall not; in that case, it is probably something we should add to bug 535847 (review, revise licensing policy).

Comment 4

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Licence policy, bullets 4 and 5:

4. For Third Party Code, you should use the license pertaining to that code when modifying it or adding new files to it, and the tri-license when adding Mozilla-specific files such as build system files. See below for the code this applies to.

5. All Product Code must be under either the tri-license or, for Third Party Product Code, a license compatible with all three sets of terms in the tri-license. The purpose of this rule is to make sure that users of our code can take and use the same code under any one of the three licenses; no group is disadvantaged.

So we just leave the headers alone. Code which is BSD/MIT or similar can go anywhere in the tree; it doesn't have to (and shouldn't) go in other-licenses.

Does that answer the question?

Gerv

Comment 5

[Luis Villa [Outside Counsel; for non-law use [e-mail]]]

That does, and also clarifies those sections for me.

I think we can resolve this bug as FIXED, then?

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Yep.

Gerv