[Trisquel-devel] License of mt19937db.c

[Sam Geeraerts]

Op Mon, 15 Jul 2013 01:15:48 +0100 (BST)
schreef Andrew M. Lindley <leny2010 at member.fsf.org>:

> 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.

How the file ended up being under the Artistic License in Berkeley DB
is a good question in itself. It's not an exact copy of [7] and the
changes are likely copyrightable and copyrighted by Oracle. We can't
just take [7] under GPL and apply the diff with DB's version, because
the licenses are incompatible.

> Oracle put Berkeley DB 6.0 under GNU Affero last month [9], but it 

It would be interesting to see what the license notice in the file says
in that version.

> 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.

The file's license is not mentioned in the top level LICENSE file, so
maybe they're indeed not aware of it. I'll just ask them about it.

> [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