Date
1 - 5 of 5
Caldera license question
J Lovejoy
Hi all,
I came across a "variant" of the Caldera license. Here is what we have on SPDX: https://spdx.org/licenses/Caldera.html But this project - http://heirloom.sourceforge.net/sh.html has this license but it omits the first paragraph and next few lines. That part alone isn't a full match otherwise. (see attached) I'm wondering if we should made that first part optional as it does seem to be very specific code, as listed. The Heirloom Bourne Shell project is used in Fedora, so that's how it came up. I don't know if it's used elsewhere or if this variant of the license, but any info on that would be helpful! Thanks, Jilayne |
|
Warner Losh
On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 9:39 AM J Lovejoy <opensource@...> wrote:
I wonder why they are using the Caldera license? Did they harvest these files from the 7th Edition of Unix, or did Sun license these and Caldera made them put this license on things? The version 7 /bin/sh was included in the grant of the original license, and the System V version was excluded which is what the OpenSolaris one is based on if it came from Sun's repo... But I've not done the software archaeology to know from whence this project started their sources.... Though thinking about it, it likely doesn't matter for our purposes... I think having a variant is fine as long as the consensus legal opinion of this team is that the differences don't change anything. The first few paragraphs could only apply to the ancient unix sources and nothing else that wants to use this license. Followup question though: Once the first few lines are removed, is the license the same as one of the BSD and/or MIT variants? Warner
|
|
Armijn Hemel - Tjaldur Software Governance Solutions
Op 25 okt. 2021 om 23:24 heeft Warner Losh <imp@...> het volgende geschreven:
|
|
Warner Losh
On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 4:15 PM Armijn Hemel <armijn@...> wrote:
Right. This doesn't answer my question about their heirloom /bin/sh. Was it from Caldera or was it from Sun? And why did they drop the intro text? Warner
|
|
Philippe Ombredanne
Dear Warner, Armijn and Jillayne:
On Tue, Oct 26, 2021 at 1:20 AM Warner Losh <imp@...> wrote: So with a bit of digging in CVS (yeah!) ... on only one fileDid they harvest these files from the 7th Edition of Unix, or did Sun license these and Caldera made them put this license on things? The version 7 /bin/sh was included in the grant of the original license, and the System V version was excluded which is what the OpenSolaris one is based on if it came from Sun's repo... But I've not done the software archaeology to know from whence this project started their sources... (gmatch.c), it looks like the original commit had this caldera license header alright and that must have been added when porting from the 7th edition, per the "Derived from /usr/src/cmd/sh/expand.c, Unix 7th Edition:" comment in that file. https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V7/usr/src/cmd/sh/expand.c did not have such notice. So I would surmise that Gunnar Ritter (Heirloom's original creator) took the original 7th edition code from TUHS and used the TUHS-provided Caldera notice (such as at https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/Caldera-license.txt ) to add as a comment in the code. The timeline of various events supports this analysis. Sven Mascheck <mascheck@...> has an extensive Shell history at https://www.in-ulm.de/~mascheck/bourne/#heirloom including a Heirloom shell commit log that matches the CVS's log at https://sourceforge.net/projects/heirloom/ With all that said, the license text that we discuss here and as seen in gmatch.c is IMHO closest to a plain BSD-4-Clause with minor variations (e.g. scope of source and documentation vs. only source in BSD-4-Clause) so if the intro blurb seen in the SPDX Caldera text is not material, then may be the body text itself could be just a minor variant of the BSD-4-Clause. Someone could bug Gunnar Ritter at <gunnarr@...> of course to get confirmation. -- Cordially Philippe Ombredanne +1 650 799 0949 | pombredanne@... DejaCode - What's in your code?! - http://www.dejacode.com AboutCode - Open source for open source - https://www.aboutcode.org nexB Inc. - http://www.nexb.com |
|