Re: BSD license problem of BiCon was non-issue

[Muhammad Alkarouri <malkarouri at yahoo dot co dot uk>]

On ج, 2004-04-02 at 23:56, Behdad Esfahbod wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I just found that the BSD license problem we had in the BiCon's
> early days, was a non-issue, as on July 22 1999, the 4BSD people
> of Berkeley posted a not that the clause can be simply deleted:
> 
> ftp://ftp.cs.berkeley.edu/pub/4bsd/README.Impt.License.Change
> 

Quite interesting. The funny thing is that I already know of this
document, I simply didn't relate it to our situation.

> Well, so now we have the old alternative if the code from Python
> goes problematic some day ;).
> 

;)

> Unfortunately this, added to the FriBidi+PuTTY problem, show that
> we need more legal-aware hackers...
> 

I hope that we learn from these. I am trying to make a summary of the
Fribidi+PuTTY problem, please correct me if I am wrong:
- Fribidi is LGPL licensed.
- An LGPL licensed software cannot be legally used within an MIT
licensed project, at least not with the result being MIT licensed.
- The PuTTY project needs to use BiDi code (equivalent to Fribidi) but
does not want to use it as an external library (technical issues).
- Possible solutions:
* Fribidi copyright owners change license to something more permissive
or grant PuTTY an exception.
* PuTTY uses other code with a less retrictive license, like the ICU
library (MIT license).
* PuTTY write their own code.

> --behdad
>   behdad.org
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