License review for new itext version

[Tom Marble]

Jonathan Underwood <jonathan.underwood <at> gmail.com> writes:
> Happy to - is there anyone that is the obvious contact at Sun? I am
> looking now, but don't see a useful contact on the openjdk page.
I'm sorry that you had trouble identifying contacts for OpenJDK
on our page:
  http://openjdk.java.net/

We have several mailing lists, blogs and a couple of IRC channels
through which we may be contacted.

In any case it would appear that the upstream source of the
files in question is not, in fact, part of the Java SE Platform
itself (i.e. not a file which is part of OpenJDK).

Hints in the iText file suggest that this is based on the JAI
(Java Advanced Imaging) tools and probably is not from a current 
release.  By pulling the source of jai-core out of CVS from
  https://jai-core.dev.java.net/
I do find a file
  (NOTE: URL BROKEN to comply to Gmane 80 character line limit, sorry)
  https://jai-core.dev.java.net/source/browse/jai-core/src/share/classes/
  com/sun/media/jai/codecimpl/TIFFLZWDecoder.java?view=markup
Which may bear some historical relationship to
  http://itext.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/*checkout*/itext/trunk/src/
  com/lowagie/text/pdf/LZWDecoder.java?content-type=text%2Fplain
However I would like to call to everyone's attention that the
"nuke" clause does not exist in the current version.

Alan Cox wrote:
> "ii) Licensee does not utilize the software in a manner which is
> disparaging to Sun Microsystems."
> This is incompatible with open source. (As indeed would be one which forbid 
> its use disparaging to Fedora).
Please understand that Sun has worked quite hard to contribute
a great deal of our software portfolio to open source.  Sometimes
historical licensing practices are tricky to find and fix.
In the case of the "nuke" clause our counsel has allowed us to 
drop that language.  If anyone finds other instances of this language
in current Sun open source code releases please bring them to our
attention and we will make sure they are corrected.

In this case please be aware that certain of the libraries in
question may also be under consideration for and/or undergoing
license changes (i.e. may be relicensed or multiply licensed):
  http://blogs.sun.com/tmarble/entry/itp_that_cool_java_thing

Getting code provenance tracked accurately, updating copyright notices
and insuring appropriate project licensing is difficult and important
work.  Please let us know how we might help the Fedora project in
this regard.

Respectfully,

--Tom (OpenJDK Ambassador)