My open tickets in bugzilla.fedora.us

[Warren Togami]

I looked into your two packages and the Bugzilla history.  Some comments 
below.

Gianluca Sforna wrote:
> I have a couple of pending package requests in bugzilla.fedora.us:
> https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2329

Compton is a long time trusted contributor, so we can fast track this 
into FC3 Extras now that we are no longer stuck on the valgrind issue. 
As for maintainership of the package in Extras, being a package owner 
does NOT automatically give you the right to full CVS access.  You would 
need to convince one of the existing "Trusted" contributors to sponsor 
your membership and take responsibility if anything goes wrong.

(When the account management system is written though, then we can 
probably give CVS access to many more people with commit access to their 
own packages only, until they become sponsored.)

So anyway, I will personally review this package and import it this week.

> and
> https://bugzilla.fedora.us/show_bug.cgi?id=2398

IANAL, but the license issues surrounding this software are confusing 
and possibly problematic.

http://www.tecn.upf.es/openMOIV/openmoiv/license.html
"Because OpenMOIV is a derived product of  Molecular Inventor (you can 
consider OpenMOIV as a modification of Molecular Inventor), you need to 
accept two licenses in order to use it: the original license from 
Silicon Graphics (applicable to the initial source code) and the 
GNU/LGPL license for our modifications and improvements."

"Molecular Inventor License" has language like "non-transferable and 
non-exclusive" and "Licensee shall not assign or otherwise transfer its 
rights or obligations under this License Agreement without the prior 
written consent..."  To my non-lawyer eyes, this sounds contradictory to 
the GPL or LGPL, where it is very important that rights are transferrable.

It is one thing to dual-license software, the copyright holder can 
release software under different licenses, however if OpenMOIV 
explicitly says that you must accept BOTH licenses, then it sounds 
horribly problematic.  However...

http://oss.sgi.com/projects/inventor/license.html
http://freshmeat.net/projects/openinventor/

 From the looks of it though, here SGI explicitly states "LGPL" as the 
license for Open Inventor with no mention of the "Molecular Inventor" 
license.  So it may be possible that OpenMOIV is just confused in their 
licensing statement?

In any case we need to clear this up in order to move forward.  Please 
find more information (URL's) about this situation so we can summarize 
the legal question for submission to Red Hat's legal queue.  They will 
give us a 'yes' or 'no'.

Warren Togami
wtogami at redhat.com