[arch-general] Question about the license of opera

[DrCR]

"I can look at the license and then see what authority
exists to either substantiate the concerns or provide the information showing
that the concern is unjustified."

Nah, not lawyer speak. Just educated english speak. ;p

On Sat, Apr 25, 2009 at 8:54 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> David C. Rankin wrote:
>>
>> Allan McRae wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> Attila wrote:
>>>
>>>>
>>>> Hi,
>>>>
>>>> i recognized that there is new package in aur for opera with this
>>>> informations:
>>>>
>>>> "This package is the official one from the [extra] repository. We have
>>>> to move
>>>> it because of a unclear license issue. After we have clarify this
>>>> issue the
>>>> package will be back in the repos or not. It should not be moved to
>>>> community, because of the license."
>>>>
>>>> I'm a little bit surprised that a custom license is such a problem
>>>> because
>>>> this shows me 343 entries:
>>>>
>>>> find /var/abs -name PKGBUILD | \
>>>>  xargs grep license | \
>>>>  grep custom | grep extra | wc -l
>>>>
>>>> Will now all packages with custom licenses disappear from extra?
>>>>
>>>
>>> No.  Only the ones where it is unclear if we can legally distribute it.
>>>
>>
>>
>>        What are the issues surrounding the Opera License?? If I can't help
>> with the
>> technical side, I can sure help with the legal side. What concerns does
>> Arch
>> have with the Opera license? What part do you think is "unclear" so as to
>> justify moving the package?
>>
>
> I really do no want to get in to this too much on the mailing list as the
> devs are already dealing with this, but the license is actually quite clear:
>
> "You shall not modify, translate, reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble
> the Software or any part thereof or otherwise attempt to derive source code,
> create or use derivative works therefrom."
>
> Now look at the PKGBUILD
> (http://aur.archlinux.org/packages/opera/opera/PKGBUILD) and notice the sed
> and patch lines there.  That would be doing something to "modify the
> Software"...
>
>>        With that information, I can look at the license and then see what
>> authority
>> exists to either substantiate the concerns or provide the information
>> showing
>> that the concern is unjustified.
>>
>
> Argh!  Lawyer speak!
>
> Allan
>
>
>
>