[Sugar-devel] Licensing of the javascript libraries

[Walter Bender]

On Mon, Jun 10, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Bradley M. Kuhn
<bkuhn at sfconservancy.org> wrote:
> Walter Bender wrote at 07:09 (EDT) on Saturday:
>> (1) We have some of the core Sugar code still under LGPLv2 (e.g.,
>> sugar-artwork) which we would like to change to LGPLv3.  (2) We would
>> like to add a second (Apache) license to this same code.
>
> Can you confirm the license of the LGPLv2'd code?  Specifically, my
> question is: "Is that code licensed LGPLv2-or-later or LGPLv2-only?"
> That detail is very important, because ...
>
>> [I]s there a specific mechanism we should use when reaching out to
>> authors?
>
> ... if the code is already LGPLv2-or-later, you *don't* need the
> copyright holders *separate* permission to relicense under LGPLv3,
> because such permission is already given.  If it's LGPLv2-only, you
> *will* need to get permission from copyright holders to relicense.  If
> you need to do the latter, Conservancy is happy to help with that.
> (We've helped other Conservancy member projects do similar in the past.)

I am guessing it is LGPLv2 only. The license is in the COPYING file,
not in each SVG.

https://github.com/sugarlabs/sugar-artwork/blob/master/COPYING

>
>> (3) We want to incorporate some code snippets from some code that "is
>> placed in the public domain". Can we include this in an LGPLv3
>> library? And how do we acknowledge the original author (i.e., do we
>> include him in the new copyright notification)?
>
> Public domain dedications are tricky.  Can you show us the full details
> of who put the item into the public domain and how?  In most countries,
> it's not possible to easily "put something in the public domain", but
> depending on how they did, we could consider their "public domain
> dedication" to be a permissive license.

https://github.com/sodabrew/fatattr/blob/master/fatattr.c

I grab some bits and piece that got incorporated into:
https://github.com/dnarvaez/sugar-toolkit-gtk3/blob/master/src/sugar3/sugar-fatattr.c

>
> If we're able to communicate with the copyright holder(s) who wish to
> put the work into the "public domain", we'd recommend they use CC-0 (
> http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/ ).
> --
> Bradley M. Kuhn, Executive Director, Software Freedom Conservancy


regards.

-walter
--
Walter Bender
Sugar Labs
http://www.sugarlabs.org