https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=672491
https://bugzilla.novell.com/show_bug.cgi?id=672491#c27
--- Comment #27 from Jörg Schiling 2011-03-16 17:22:42 UTC ---
Thank you for your work and for finding this out.
It seems that I did overlook that the code in vcdimager not only contains the
old number tables but also the newer ones from the completely rearranged code
that we put under GPL in 2002. As most of the changes are hidden by macros and
tables, this is not easy to see and the unwilling vcdimager author + the still
old Copyright notice caused a high probability for a mistake here....
It seems that the current code in vcdimager really uses the newer GPL variant
of the original code. This however does not make vcdimager a legal piece of
work
as the code distributed with vcdimager still contains Copyright notices
from the original (closed source) implementation like:
(C) 1998 Heiko Eissfeldt
The correct Copyright message for the GPL variant of libedc is:
* Copyright 1998-2002 by Heiko Eissfeldt
* Copyright 2002 by Joerg Schilling
and this would need to appear in the related vcdimager source files to make it
legally distributable.
Regarding the GPL version to use... Heiko and I concur that the GPLv2+ notice
in
the code published in October 2002 was a result of a mistake (due to the
unlucky
defaults in the GPL text from the FSF). We both do not give our permission for
using GPLv3 or later - the code needs to stay under GPLv2 only.
You might know that in Germany, a contract (this is what the GPL is in
Germany) is void by law in case it contains clauses that are not fully known
at the time the contract is entered (in our case October 2002). We did not
publish an updated version of the GPLd version past April 2003 (in special, we
did not publish an updated GPL version past June 2007). We instead changed
the license to CDDL on May 15th 2006 - which is before GPLv3 came out.
A lawful approval for "GPLv2 or any later" related to GPLv3 thus would need
a revised republished source that mentions GPLv2+ and a revised republished GPL
variant of the source source has been created past June 2007.
For this reason, we believe that we did never give a lawful permission to
publish libedc under GPLv3 or later.
If you do not like to upgrade to the recent code (being under CDDL), we like
you to make sure that the code mentions:
* Copyright 1998-2002 by Heiko Eissfeldt
* Copyright 2002 by Joerg Schilling
.....
* This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
* it under the terms of the GNU General Public License version 2
* as published by the Free Software Foundation.
and that all files derived from: ecc.h, edc_ecc.c, encoder_tables, l2sq_table
are also correctly quoted/licensed.
We are looking forward to a revised vcdimager source that is used as a base for
code distributed by Suse.
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