[License-review] For Approval: libpng license, version 2.0

Sat Nov 17 21:13:30 UTC 2018

I just saw this thread. I'm sorry for the late response.

What is the problem? The libpng license is permissive. It allows you to license your derivative works under any license of your choice, so long as you don't misrepresent it as entirely your own work; you must acknowledge that you created a derivative work; and you must leave the original libpng license in the source code to reflect the original work's availability under that original libpng license.

Why do you need a "version 2.0"? You can already do almost anything you need to do to own the future of this program.

/Larry

From: License-review <license-review-bounces at lists.opensource.org> On Behalf Of Henrik Ingo
Sent: Saturday, November 17, 2018 12:07 PM
To: license-review at lists.opensource.org
Subject: Re: [License-review] For Approval: libpng license, version 2.0

Hi Cosmin

On Tue, Nov 6, 2018 at 11:02 AM Cosmin Truta <ctruta at gmail.com <mailto:ctruta at gmail.com> > wrote:

Thank you for sending me all of that detailed information regarding
the legal foundations that I can contact, Henrik. I was not aware of
them. I will consider contacting them, in the future.

You're welcome. They're a great resource for projects like yours.

> If you modify libpng you may insert additional notices immediately
> following this sentence.

Henrik Ingo wrote:
> [...] it would be worth looking into the alternatives you
> mentioned, such as moving the contributors to a separate flat list.

Since the lists of previous contributing authors have been integrated
into the past libpng license text, I'm not touching those. But
besides that, all contributors, past, present and future, will be
mentioned in a separate flat list from now on.

https://gist.github.com/ctruta/5e276eb83213f9d66bf61539156830c5#file-authors-md

My logic was that if you could go back with a proposal drafted by a respected open source legal expert, it may be more persuasive. But maybe not. I fully understand that as the major contributor to the project is no longer alive, it's not easy to negotiate with his last stated opinion on the matter. Even if his estate might be legally empowered to have such a dialogue, it might not be the right thing to do. Even then, my suggestion was that talking to a real lawyer wouldn't hurt (in this respect, as well as in general).

> Getting this sort of support from SFLC or SFC is a good suggestion,
> but acceptance by those groups tends to take a long time. Finding
> other pro-bono help might be appropriate.

I have already been asked, by eagerly-awaiting users, when will the
new ready-to-ship fixes and improvements come out officially as
libpng 1.6.36. My response to them was "after the OSI review".
(I understood that OSI recommends to only ship software with the new
license *after* the review.)

I'm not saying this to mean that I absolutely must skip a legal
review. But if a lengthy review over a lengthy period of time is
something that I could avoid, and if I could just go on the beaten
path of existing practice instead, then I'd like to do exactly that.

The ownership of libpng has been passed on from Guy Eric Schalnat and
Group 42, Inc., to Andreas Dilger, and then to Glenn Randers-Pehrson,
with no legal issues in the process. I hope I can succeed Glenn, in a
similar manner, just as well.

As a developer myself, I fully understand.

I think a silver lining here is that if the patches to the to-be-released version are all done by yourself, you would not be doing anything irrevocable by doing a release with what you have, and then seeking legal advice on the topic of how to craft the new "last version" of libpng license. For example, you could just do a new release without touching the LICENSE file at all. (But note that this may not be compliant with the old licenses, which forbid publishing changes without clearly attributing changes to the new author.) Even here, it's in *your own interest* to have a lawyer involved to protect yourself, but I don't see any lasting harm to the community and your users if you wanted to go ahead and do a release quickly without waiting for legal advice.

Hope this helps. Not much more someone like me can say here.

henrik

-- 

henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi <mailto:henrik.ingo at avoinelama.fi> 
+358-40-5697354        skype: henrik.ingo            irc: hingo
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