[Trisquel-devel] License of mt19937db.c

[Andrew M. Lindley]

From: Sam Geeraerts <samgee at elmundolibre.be>
Subject: [Trisquel-devel] License of mt19937db.c
Date: Sun, 14 Jul 2013 20:19:52 +0200

> I'm catching up on gNewSense bugs and I'm now looking at the 
> Mersenne
> Twister bug [1] again. At the time it was found to be under the
> Artistic License. At Rubén's request the copyright holders 
> relicensed
> it to GPL [2].
>
> At what I think is the current homepage of the implementation [3] I
> found old GPL versions [4]. The "newest version of original
> authors" [5] is licensed under the Modified BSD license.
>
> File crypto/mersenne/mt19937db.c in Trisquel's db4.8 looks like it's
> still the one from the upstream Berkeley DB project, carrying the
> Artistic License notice. The recommended fix in the NONFSDG list [6]
> says to either remove the package or use a GPL version of the file. 
> So
> far, gNewSense and Trisquel have done neither.
>
> What do you see as a solution, considering that packages like
> exim4-base depend on db and replacing the file means reintegrating 
> it
> without looking too hard at the current file in db?

Hi Sam,

Firstly AFAICT only Ruben can speak for the distro, if you want an 
official opinion hunt him down as quidam on IRC chan #trisquel on 
freenode is the best advice I've seen.

Glancing in crypto/mersenne/mt19937db.c from the latest debian db 
package git source I notice from the version & description that it 
appears to be a derivative of [7].  The good Professor Matsumoto and 
her/his student didn't dual GPL 3 / Artistic license it as per 
Ruben's suggestion in the email [8] linked from your link [6], it is 
now just GPL 2 or later.   What this does to derivatives that 
pre-date the license change I don't know, but it might be worth 
asking someone who will in the free software community to see if it 
automatically makes derivatives GPL in some jurisdiction.  This may 
be a non problem now.

Oracle put Berkeley DB 6.0 under GNU Affero last month [9], but it 
requires a login to get the source from them and I couldn't find 
another copy with a quick search.  All the developer login id 
agreements I've ever seen include an NDA so I didn't bother with 
trying to get one.  Logic is a bit of persistence looking around the 
source repos of those fool open source distros will find you a copy.  
Backporting that (assuming Oracle themselves are aware of the license 
of the 4.8 file) might be easier than the alternatives.  If Oracle 
are not aware of the license position it is probably worth asking 
them to fix it now the authors of the original have done their bit.

Leny / Andrew

[7] 
http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/991029/mt19937int.c 
.
[8] 
http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2010-05/msg00000.html
[9] https://oss.oracle.com/pipermail/bdb/2013-June/000056.html

>
> [1] https://savannah.nongnu.org/bugs/index.php?29840
> [2]
> http://lists.nongnu.org/archive/html/gnu-linux-libre/2010-05/msg00000.html
> [3] http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/emt.html
> [4]
> http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/ver980409.html
> [5]
> http://www.math.sci.hiroshima-u.ac.jp/~m-mat/MT/VERSIONS/C-LANG/c-lang.html
> [6] http://libreplanet.org/wiki/NONFSDG#Oracle_Berkeley_DB