[PolyORB-users] Questions about licensing after close scrutiny by Debian

[Thomas Quinot]

* Ludovic Brenta, 2009-08-22 :

> The Debian people are now doing their due diligence to accept or reject
> PolyORB and have some legitimate questions.  I'm forwarding the email to
> you.

Who's "you"? You sent your message to polyorb-users, which is a
community forum for users...
 
> If it is not possible to secure proper licensing documentation for the
> files mentioned, we will be forced to remove these files from the
> PolyORB package in Debian.

Please clarify what files you are talking about, and what "proper
licensing documentation" means in the context of your query.
code in PolyORB has been assigned to the Free Software Fundation, so 

> I could not find on-line traces of the relicensing of PolyORB to the GPL. Maybe

I do not understand this question from the reviewer. There is no notion
of "relicensing" PolyORB, all public distributions of PolyORB always
have been made under the GPL.

> you can clarify if the Maintainer's note comes from a private email or a file
> in the subversion repository.

I don't know what the "maintainer's note" is, so can't comment on that.

> Although I could not download the orig.tar.gz file of your package, I checked
> out the PolyORB Subversion sources and found files in ./testsuite/idls/test*
> with the following header:

This part seems completely irrelevant, how can the Subversion repository
possibly matter? The reviewer really needs to review what is in your
package.

> // Copyright (c) 1997 X/Open Company Ltd., A member of The Open Group.

That's for IDL files that are part of the OMG standards. These are
freely redistributable, owned by the OMG and/or its contributors.

> It is unclear what the end-user licence agreement is; maybe it can be clarified?

Ask the OMG...

> Other undocumented copyright holders follow:
> 
> ./idls/RTCORBA/RTCORBA.idl://Copyright ??? 1998,1999, Alcatel
> ./idls/RTCORBA/RTCORBA.idl://Copyright ??? 1989- 2001, Hewlett-Packard Company

[...]

That's all part of the OMG-issued standard IDL files.

> ./compilers/ciao/ada_be-mappings-dsa.adb:--          Copyright (C) 1999-2002 ENST Paris University, France.          --
> ./compilers/ciao/ciao-types.ads:--  Copyright (C) 1999 ???cole nationale sup???rieure des t???l???communications.
> ./compilers/ciao/ciao-alloc.ads:--  Copyright (C) 1999 ???cole nationale sup???rieure des t???l???communications.
> ./compilers/ciao/ciao-hostparm.ads:--  Copyright (C) 1999 ???cole nationale sup???rieure des t???l???communications.

These files are not in MANIFEST, there's no reason for them to be
included in any package, that's entirely historical code (and anyway
it's GPL'd as well).
 
Thomas.

-- 
Thomas Quinot, Ph.D. ** quinot at adacore.com ** Senior Software Engineer
               AdaCore -- Paris, France -- New York, USA
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