[Phpmyadmin-devel] tcpdf and licensing

[Marc Delisle]

Isaac Bennetch a écrit :
> Greetings,

Hi Isaac,
see the reply from Nicola Asuni (TCPDF) in our bug tracker:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=377408&aid=3460857&group_id=23067

> 
> 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
> 
> 
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-- 
Marc Delisle
http://infomarc.info