[Phpmyadmin-devel] tcpdf and licensing

[Madhura Jayaratne]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2011 at 9:02 PM, Isaac Bennetch <bennetch at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> On 12/16/2011 10:26 AM, Marc Delisle wrote:
> > 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
>
> Thanks, sorry for the noise here, then. Apparently jimmik posted the bug
> around the same time ChrisWi came to IRC; since the tracker has more
> existing discussion let's continue the conversion there.
>
> >> 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
>
>
As mentioned in the tracker [1] TCPDF in its latest version(5.9.145) has
removed the additional clause in its licence. Shall we update  QA_3_5 to
use the latest version? Or only the master should be updated?

-- 
Thanks and Regards,

Madhura Jayaratne

[1]
http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&atid=377408&aid=3460857&group_id=23067
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