[Phpmyadmin-devel] tcpdf and licensing

[Isaac Bennetch]

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/000028.html) 
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