[Rpm-maint] [rpm-software-management/rpm] License of find-lang.sh is ambiguous around modification (#595)

Tom Callaway notifications at github.com
Fri Nov 9 15:35:52 UTC 2018


Because I enjoy resolving 20 year old licensing issues... :)

The existing license on find-lang.sh reads:

```
#findlang is copyright (c) 1998 by W. L. Estes <wlestes at uncg.edu>

#Redistribution and use of this software are hereby permitted for any
#purpose as long as this notice and the above copyright notice remain
#in tact and are included with any redistribution of this file or any
#work based on this file.
```

This license, like many early FOSS licenses, is ambiguous about its support for modification. It also does not carry any sort of warranty disclaimer. I have reached out to Mr. Estes, who has given permission via email for this work to be relicensed under a modern permissive license, specifically, MIT (https://opensource.org/licenses/MIT). I can provide copies of this correspondence upon request. He has clarified that permitting modification of this file was his original intent, however, it is still worth changing this license to prevent others from copying it elsewhere.

In the twenty years or so that this code has been in RPM, the following contributors seem to have made copyrightable contributions to it:

@proyvind @pmatilai @scop @ffesti @jnovy @arekm 

If each of them are okay with relicensing this work under MIT, I would recommend that this happen. I can make a PR if needed.

-- 
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/rpm-software-management/rpm/issues/595
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.rpm.org/pipermail/rpm-maint/attachments/20181109/509ac503/attachment.html>


More information about the Rpm-maint mailing list