[Fedora-legal-list] Licensing issue in OpenLayers package (already in Fedora)

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

Hi,

The OpenLayers package (already in Fedora, owned by Cristian in CC and
of which I'm a co-maintainer) bundles a JavaScript minimizer called
jsmin [1]. I know this is bad practice to have a tool bundled like
this, and I wanted to remove it from the source RPM and make it use a
system version of jsmin that would be installed in its own package.

However, I saw that jsmin had already been submitted to Fedora and was
refused because the license specifies that « The Software shall be
used for Good, not Evil. » [2]

I discussed it with the OpenLayers devs (see attached IRC log) and it
seems we have 2 possibilities.

1. The jsmin.py script was rewritten from scratch to mimic the
behavior of the C original version. It currently contains the
following license header:

====
# This code is original from jsmin by Douglas Crockford, it was translated to
# Python by Baruch Even. The original code had the following copyright and
# license.
#
# /* jsmin.c
#    2007-01-08
#
# Copyright (c) 2002 Douglas Crockford  (www.crockford.com)
#
# Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person
obtaining a copy of
# this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in
# the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to
# use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies
# of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do
# so, subject to the following conditions:
#
# The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
# copies or substantial portions of the Software.
#
# The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.
#
# THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
# IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
# FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
# AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
# LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
# OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
# SOFTWARE.
# */
====

The part between JavaScript comments is the original problematic
license (starts with « /* » and ends with « */ »).

My question is, as this seems to be a « clean room implementation »,
could it have a different license than the original jsmin ? This would
make the python version suitable for Fedora (correct me if I'm wrong)
and that would allow me to build OpenLayers using it.

2. The second possibility is to simply build OpenLayers without jsmin.
This would however result in a much bigger JavaScript file, leading to
worse performances.

That's a solution I'd rather avoid, but if this is the only
possibility, I'll do it.

Best regards,


[1] http://www.crockford.com/javascript/jsmin.html
[2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=455507


----------

Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)
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