tech-pkg archive

[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index][Old Index]

Re: archivers/szip license



On 2019-04-19 09:03, Greg Troxel wrote:
Jason Bacon<outpaddling%yahoo.com@localhost>  writes:

[crossposting pruned]

I think the license restrictions listed in Makefile are wrong:

https://support.hdfgroup.org/doc_resource/SZIP/Commercial_szip.html

I don't see anything to indicate that it cannot be redistributed in
binary form, only that certain types of commercial use are not allowed
without permission.
That's not how copyright works; failing to find a "restriction" does not
mean that copying is permitted.  One needs an affirmative license to
copy.  And binary packages are derived works, so one needs a license to
create and distribuute those.

The text only grants permission to "use", which is not a right reserved
to the copyright holder, so that should probably be construed as a
patent grant.

Any objections to changing it so we can generate binary packages?
I don't think we have a license to do so.  You could write them and ask
them to clarify.   I would expect that in this case, the copyright has a
fairly high likelihood of being will to grant the license we need for
source and binary redistribution.

Thanks, I have reached out to them and will report if/when they respond.

In the meantime, I found another implementation, libaec, which contains the following reference to the patents:

https://github.com/erget/libaec/blob/cmake-install-instructions/doc/patent.txt

This seems to eliminate patent issues for any implementation, although the szip software itself may still have its own restrictions.

The libaec implementation has what looks like a 2-clause BSD license.

FreeBSD has both an szip and a libaec package with binary packages, Debian has only libaec and the Debian hdf5 package depends on it, rather than the original szip implementation.

I'll create wip/libaec shortly.  Perhaps we can leave this issue behind by using libaec instead.  If not, I can try to verify whether the FreeBSD szip port is really complying with the license terms.

Home | Main Index | Thread Index | Old Index