Re: BSD Protection License - bsdiff

On 22/10/10 10:12, John Vandenberg wrote:
> bsdiff is listed as 'Third Party Code' under a the 'BSD Protection
> License'.  It appears to be Non-Product code.

It is non-product code; my understanding is that it is used for the 
creation (but not application; that is bspatch) of Firefox updates.

However, it seems that the latest version of the license, version 4.3, 
is available under a straight BSD license:
http://www.daemonology.net/bsdiff/

> However 'BSD Protection License' does not appear in that list.
>
> There is a 2002 thread about this license on
> [email protected], but it doesn't appear to have led to a
> conclusion.

Indeed not. I think it's probably an open source licence, definitely in 
intent and probably in practice (although the email thread raises an 
interesting point about having to explicitly say people can sell the 
software).

But, given the above, I suggest we fix this problem by importing the 
latest version, rather than debating the license.

> The JPEG 'license' is also not on the OSI list.

That is more surprising.

> http://www.evolane.com/software/etcl/3rdparty/jpeg-LICENSE.txt

It seems to me that this license is a (perhaps less clear) rewrite of 
the 3-clause BSD licence - include this notice, don't use my name, no 
warranty.

> If so, perhaps this can be noted on the licensing page?
>
> Is bullet 6 a hard and fast rule?
 >
> If there is another chunk of code which is available under a JPEG-like
> license, which is basically 'as-is' but with a mandatory documentation
> notice, would licensing require that it first goes through the OSI
> approval process?

It depends what you mean by a "mandatory documentation notice". If you 
mean a 4-clause-BSD-like advertising clause:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSD_licenses#4-clause_license_.28original_.22BSD_License.22.29
(clause 3 in that text)

then that has been deemed to be not open source compatible. If you mean 
that someone has done yet another unclear rewrite of the terms of the 
3-clause BSD licence, then... let's have a look at what they've said :-)

The opensource.org list is a good rule of thumb, and we would certainly 
have pause before using software under a licence not on it. But it is 
not an exhaustive list of every OSD-compliant licence in the world, and 
so the possibility exists that we would accept software under a licence 
not on the list, after careful evaluation.

Does that answer your question? It would help if you could be more 
specific about which code we are talking about.

Gerv