[Snowball-discuss] License file shipping required by BSD license

[jpacner at redhat.com]

Hello Martin,

thank you for explaining the situation. In my country, it's forced by
law, that the work/subject is always copyrighted by the original author.
Therefore e.g. works/subjects in public domain are illegal (yes, it's
really that stupid). If there is no notion about authors in the
distributed package itself, it's considered public domain => illegal.

If in the distribution is only a remark that this work is licensed under
BSD and authors are X, Y, Z, it's still illegal, because BSD license
itself has to contain the author`s names and therefore one can't just
download somewhere some template and make the license himself by adding
the mentioned author`s names to it.

Also the snowball software BSD license (i.e. 2-clause one) has to be
shipped with source and binaries as the license states and I quote:

#######
1. Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.

2. Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright
notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the
documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
#######

I don't doubt that if upstream itself has difficulties with
determination how particular parts of their SW are licensed, after some
time no bigger piece of software will use it just because of uncertain
licensing and therefore possibility to experience law issues.

Sooner the licensing issues will be resolved, the better.

-- Jan Pacner


On 05/12/2014 12:42 PM, Martin Porter wrote:
> Thanks Olly.
> 
> A problem is that the snowball code can be used in many ways: there
> are contributed stemmers in a variety of programming languages. These
> are quite separate, and many do not contain a licence statement. I
> can't go through adding the BSD licence text in (I don't know the
> comment conventions for all the programming languages involved), and I
> certainly don't want to bother all the contributors. There are the
> generated stemmers in C and Java. These, with the extra bit of library
> code to drive them, are no doubt used much more widely than the
> snowball compiler itself. The algorithms themselves, and the
> vocabularies and stopword lists, are also, in a sense, BSD licenced,
> except that they are algorithms and data rather than software. Anyway,
> for snowball there is no one single download.
> 
> The easiest thing is to add the BSD licence into the compiler header
> file, but I'm not sure that would cover everything Jan requires.
> 
> Jan, could you elaborate on this "it's illegal in some countries (e.g.
> in my country :()" note of yours?
> 
> For example, the BSD licence says you can alter the code but not
> change the licence, so if you alter the code by adding in the text of
> the BSD licence that must be legal. Then you can pass it on to someone
> else and satisfy your country's laws. If you can't even add in the BSD
> licence without breaking the law ... well ... what's the worse that
> can happen?
> 
> Martin