Bug 4853 - pclcomp is hideously non-free
Summary: pclcomp is hideously non-free
Status: RESOLVED FIXED
Alias: None
Product: xorg
Classification: Unclassified
Component: App/other (show other bugs)
Version: git
Hardware: All All
: high major
Assignee: Adam Jackson
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Keywords: licence
Depends on:
Blocks: 1690
  Show dependency treegraph
 
Reported: 2005-10-23 22:10 UTC by Daniel Stone
Modified: 2005-12-09 10:42 UTC (History)
3 users (show)

See Also:
i915 platform:
i915 features:


Attachments

Description Daniel Stone 2005-10-23 22:10:44 UTC
the file says it all: 'all rights reserved'.
Comment 1 Alan Coopersmith 2005-10-24 09:06:31 UTC
pclcomp originally came from this comp.sources.misc posting:
http://gatekeeper.dec.com/pub/usenet/comp.sources.misc/volume25/pclcomp/

While it doesn't contain a formal license, it does say:
"You may use parts of this code within your drivers to support compression
if you wish."
Comment 2 Mike A. Harris 2005-11-22 07:18:48 UTC
Under copyright law, you only have rights which are explicitly granted
in the license text.  Rights are not implicit.  Vague statements made
in email concerning code usage, generally aren't legally binding from
what I've been told by legal councel in the past.

I think it would be best for X.Org to avoid legal problems by contacting
the author and trying to get a proper relicensing for this, or alternatively
dropping it from the tree.

We don't ship this program in binary form, however in the monolithic tree,
it's in the source which is a bit disturbing.

Comment 3 Alan Coopersmith 2005-11-22 07:26:26 UTC
The copyright owner is HP, so I'm adding HP's Xorg rep to the cc.
Comment 4 Adam Jackson 2005-11-30 08:51:53 UTC
we have never shipped pclcomp as part of any release.  it was added to satisfy
bug #631, and the commit was not done on the 6.8 branch but on HEAD leading up
to 6.9.

unless we get a clear statement from hp on the licensing, this should be dropped
from 6.9 and 7.0, and bug #631 reopened.
Comment 5 Adam Jackson 2005-12-10 04:08:45 UTC
i'll fix this.
Comment 6 Adam Jackson 2005-12-10 05:42:20 UTC
removed from the distribution as we have no right to distribute this.  hopefully
we can get the licensing sorted for 7.1.


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