On Thursday 18 March 2010 06:12:03 Murray S. Kucherawy wrote:
> ---------- Forwarded message ----------
> Date: Wed, 17 Mar 2010 14:20:32 -0400
> From: Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa_at_redhat.com>
(cut)
> Well, to be fair, most other projects (including the original BSD
> author, the Regents of the University of California) have dropped the
> advertising clause, so that's the main reason that we don't see this
> issue very often.
>
> In addition, the clause itself presents a painful burden on distributors
> such as Red Hat, wherein, we would have to take extreme care to ensure
> that if we happen to mention a feature that a component is in any way
> responsible for in "advertising materials", that the "advertising
> materials" include the explicit acknowledgement text. I can tell you
> from Red Hat's perspective, this actively motivates us to not include
> BSD with advertising code in our commercial offerings such as RHEL, not
> because we do not wish to give appropriate credit, but because the task
> of tracking and auditing all possible scenarios in which this clause may
> come into effect is extremely time-consuming and painful, so much so
> that it almost always outweighs the benefits provided by the software!
I pretty much second this opinion. I've refused to add products using BSD-4
clause licenses to Gentoo because there is a lack of recording mechanism to
consider it when distributing/adverstising the finished distribution. Even for
a volunteer distribution I don't want to incur the liability for Gentoo if
someone falls short of adhering to this 4th clause. The implications for
Redhat are larger in reputation and cost.
The ability to be distributed without pain to the distributor will cause a
greater benefit to OpenDKIM than I expect the advertising clause ever will.
> (FSF documents this here: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#OrigBSD)
>
> There are a few ways this is resolvable for Fedora (off the top of my
> head):
I quite like the A,B,C of these options.
>
> A) The copyright holders of the library under BSD w/advertising drop
> that clause entirely.....
> B) In your code, the BSD with advertising license is reworded so that in
> the advertising clause, the word "must" is replaced with "should"....
Altering licenses beyond their standard form is also a little painful for
distributors. They have their sets of standard accepted licenses and
modifications need to go though legal channels of some sort.
Having a non-license note that we'd like you to advertise this on your
products would be more favourable here.
> C) You dual-license the code with something that is GPL compatible,
> perhaps with the GPL itself. ...
> D) You can do nothing,
I haven't looked into the Sendmail license to see what OpenDKIM can do with
regard to license change being a derivative work.
Daniel
Received on Wed Mar 17 2010 - 23:20:10 PST