[Phpmyadmin-devel] legal concerns about external libraries

[Marc Delisle]

Isaac Bennetch a écrit :
> Good day, team
> 
> The Fedora legal team has discovered a potential licensing problem in 
> the PHPExcel library bundled with phpMyAdmin. If true, and I am not a 
> lawyer but it seems they are correct, that puts phpMyAdmin itself in 
> violation and Fedora would then remove our package until we resolve the 
> licensing problem.
> 
> The report is at https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=629214 and 
> the Tom there is from the Fedora Legal team, Robert is the (friendly) 
> Fedora phpMyAdmin maintainer who I've also copied on this message (who 
> first came to us on IRC to discuss this problem).
> 
> It looks like the problem had been reported to the PHPExcel in February 
> of 2010 but not resolved 
> (http://phpexcel.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=83335).

The change in license exists in the downloaded version of PHPExcel 
1.7.6; this was not done by the phpMyAdmin team.

The idea is that we want to remove the problematic files.

For exporting in Excel 2007, my quick test worked (after removing
PHPExcel/Shared/OLE directory, OLE.php and OLERead.php).

For exporting in Excel 97-2003, it does not work, we would have to
remove the calling of class PHPExcel_Shared_OLE_PPS_FILE from
Writer/Excel5.php and maybe some other tweaking.

I suggest dropping support for "Excel 97-2003". An alternative for these 
versions is our "CSV for MS Excel" export.

> 
> Robert's also mentioned that they're investigating a similar claim 
> regarding tcpdf; I believe that discussion is at 
> https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=548260
> 
> Regards,
> ~isaac



-- 
Marc Delisle
http://infomarc.info