Greetings,
As you might recall from the PHPExcel licensing discussion (https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/message.php?msg_id=27884122) the Fedora people were investigating a possible licensing concern with the tcpdf library we bundle. Nothing has come of that with Fedora, but apparently the SuSE people have found something they don't like. The user ChrisWi asked about it in the IRC channel and provided a link to their bugtracker: https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=736698 -- which requires a login, so he also provided the following text summary:
** begin paste ** phpMyAdmin 3.4.7.1 (and presumably many earlier versions as well) contains tcpdf. This package claims to be LGPL-3.0+ licensed but contains the following clause:
Additionally, YOU CAN'T REMOVE ANY TCPDF COPYRIGHT NOTICE OR LINK FROM THE GENERATED PDF DOCUMENTS.
As the LGPL-3.0+ incorporates by reference the GPL-3.0+, sections 7 and 10 of the GPL-3.0+ are relevant:
All other non-permissive additional terms are considered "further restrictions" within the meaning of section 10. If the Program as you received it, or any part of it, contains a notice stating that it is governed by this License along with a term that is a further restriction, you may remove that term. If a license document contains a further restriction but permits relicensing or conveying under this License, you may add to a covered work material governed by the terms of that license document, provided that the further restriction does not survive such relicensing or conveying.
Accordingly, it may be possible to point out to tcpdf upstream that the additional term that they apply may be viewed as a 'non-permissive restriction' and that you wish to exercise your rights under the GPL-3.0+ to remove that term from downstream distributions.
If upstream are unwilling to engage in meaningful discussion or take the view that the additional restriction is per se not part of the license because it is above the license and not incorporated into it, tcpdf should be dropped.
** end paste **
Now again, as I'm sure you're aware, we're not responsible for making the distributions happy, but it's also in our best interest to try to resolve these things. Looks to my non-lawyer eye like this is something to push back on the tcpdf folks. Again, if I'm understanding correctly, the problem is the additional line added that "YOU CAN'T REMOVE ANY TCPDF COPYRIGHT NOTICE OR LINK FROM THE GENERATED PDF DOCUMENTS."
Additionally, Google provides a lot of results of people questioning this. https://sourceforge.net/projects/tcpdf/forums/forum/435311/topic/3757478 seems to be the best discussion. A discussion regarding the inclusion in Tiki Wiki (http://projects.opensource.org/pipermail/license-discuss/2011-November/00002...) went so far as to bring up the dubious legal position of putting a (tcpdf) copyright notice on the work of others.
From the tcpdf forums link, it appears the author has no interest in changing this. To be fair to tcpdf, the only place I see his notice in the generated PDF is the "PDF Producer" field of the file properties. I think that's reasonable, but I think the part that concerns the SuSE folks is the having a non-OSI-endorsed clause appended to a license; if every project would do that it would be a nightmare to maintain. But that's just my interpretation.
I've signed up for a Novell account, but I'm still not authorized to view the bug report directly. At the moment, aside from the gentleman in IRC, we have no line of communication to them or way of getting updates on their internal discussion.
Thanks for your thoughts on this... ~isaac