[Bug 471915] Review Request: jbossweb2 - JBoss Web Server based on Apache Tomcat

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=471915





--- Comment #18 from Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com>  2009-01-11 16:40:33 EDT ---
So, the key problem that Red Hat Legal identified was with the licensing on the
JSON code (java/org/apache/tomcat/util/json/JSON*):

/*
Copyright (c) 2002 JSON.org

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy
of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal
in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights
to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell
copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is
furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all
copies or substantial portions of the Software.

The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY,
FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE
AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER
LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM,
OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE
SOFTWARE.
*/

The sentence "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil." makes it
non-free, as it is impossible for us to abide by that use-case restriction. We
hit this once before with a different package, and tried to contact the
copyright holder, but he was unwilling to alter the line (changing "shall" to
"should" would suffice to make it a suggestion rather than a legal
requirement). Either this code needs to be removed (from both the source and
the binary RPM) or JSON.org needs to relicense it without that sentence.

In addition to that, the license tag is incorrect on the package, there is no
LGPLv3 code in this package that I could see, all of it is either Apache 2.0,
LGPLv2+ or the non-free license I mentioned above. Remember that the presense
of LICENSING/COPYING does not signal license versioning in the case of
GPL/LGPL.

Ignoring the "Evil" license, the License tag should be:

License: LGPLv2+ and ASL 2.0

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