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

[Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)]

Hi,

On Sun, Aug 2, 2009 at 21:00, Mathieu Bridon
(bochecha)<bochecha at fedoraproject.org> wrote:
> 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:
[snip]
> 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.

Any thoughts on this solution? Is that legally possible?

If so, I'll try to contact the writer of the Python implementation to
see if he is willing to relicense his script.

> 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


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Mathieu Bridon (bochecha)