Re: Licence problem in bundled library

Hi

Legal view (I am not a lawyer, just my view):
I think it does not matter. The files contain the license header, so if 
someone edits some of these files he/she can see the license. The usage 
in TORCS is (legally) no problem, because:
- It is not problem to use/link to MPL code (because it was OUR decision 
to agree with it)
- The only drawback is if you edit the MPL 1.0 licensed files, these 
changes can be used in closed source software (because it is MPL 1.0 and 
not GPL), but I guess in a legal lawsuit an unsubstantial change in a 
work would not cause a license violation anyway (e.g. look at citations 
from books, taking a photocopy of 2 pages out of a book etc., if the 
discussed subject if not "big enough" it counts not as "work" and is not 
protected by copyright, people are often not aware of this).
Examples:
- *x header files do not violate Unix copyright, because they are 
interfaces and not substantial part of the "work", even if they look 
almost the same (how could they look very different, if they have to 
define the same symbols), additionally the legislator introduced 
copyright to support innovation, so interfaces have here a hard time anyway
- Code snippets from the internet or books, it is very common to use 
such stuff in everydays work everywhere in software engineering, this is 
as well no problem, as long as these snippets do not represent 
substantial "work" (e.g. a clever compact algorithm spanning more than a 
few lines would be already covered by copyright, where as 
"printf("Hello\n"); exit(0); would have a hard time I think).

Technical view:
- Some distributors would like to link to the expat/XXXlibraries they 
have anyway in their distro, but for the Windows users it is more 
comfortable to have the source included in the tree, so I leave it there 
for now. Distributors can patch their builds easily if they like. They 
prefer this, because they think they can then replace a broken lib once 
in the distro and this makes maintenance easier, but they do not account 
the risk (basically you change then all depending application without 
any QA or serious test, great...).
Regarding security problems the situation with a "built in" lib is not 
that bad as well, because as long you do not use an affected part of the 
library, it just does not matter.

Conclusion:
- For purists it might be not really clean, but it works, changes are 
currently not required regarding this.

Hope this helps

Bernhard


On 03/12/2012 10:24 AM, zezinho wrote:
> I was made aware of a license problem in TORCS :
>
> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4646
>
> The problem is better spoken here :
>
> https://bugs.mageia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=4646#c10
>
> The fork Speed-Dreams is on the way to use expat lib instead of txml.
>
> What do you think?
>
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