[Fedora-legal-list] Changing a license on source with nonresponsive or gone author

[Rahul Sundaram]

Ray Van Dolson wrote:

> Hi all;
> 
> This is in regards to an attempt to package figlet[1] for Fedora.  It
> turns out that part of this package[2] is under a non-free license.
> Attempts to contact the author of this code have been thus far
> unsuccessful, and I'm wondering as to the best way to proceed.
> 
> The license currently in place on these files indicate that any changes
> to the code needs to be emailed to the original author within 30 days.
> Would this cover licensing changes as well?  I'm wondering if we could
> just change the license on this code, notify the author via the email
> address provided and call it good (the author's email address isn't
> bouncing, but appears to be inactive).

IANAL and all that but you cannot do this.

> 
> Another alternative would be to have upstream replace the code with
> sufficiently free code, or to remove the functionality completely.

This would work and should be your first option

> I am also considering patching out the non-free code myself (since
> upstream doesn't really have an active maintainer right now as figlet
> has been pretty stable for years) and doing the release that way.  The
> functionality in question is for decompressing font files which we
> could easily live without.

This would work and seems to be the simplest option. Just comment the
spec file.

Rahul