Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 202519
netpbm needs some files removed
Last modified: 2013-07-02 19:17:28 EDT
This bug is being filed as part of the FSF compatible licensing audit: The netpbm package is a huge mess of mixed code, some without licensing or copyright attribution. Start with the excellent copyright analysis done by Debian, found here: http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/n/netpbm-free/netpbm-free_10.0-8sarge3/netpbm.copyright In addition, the LZW patent has expired, so ppmtogif is ok. Fedora Core's netpbm-progs package doesn't have jbigtopnm or pnmtojbig (although, they are still in the SRPM). The badly licensed hpcdtoppm isn't in the Fedora package in either source or binary format. This only leaves the bits that are listed in the Debian copyright as "Unknown, So Not Distributed". So, lets try to resolve those: pamchannel: Public Domain (OK) pamtopnm: Public Domain (OK) pbmto4425: Author says GPL. pbmtoln03: Author says Artistic. pbmtolps: Cannot find current email for author. pbmtopk/pktopbm/ppmtopjxl: Author says MIT/X11 license. spottopgm: Cannot find current email for author I suggest that we ship a modified source version of netpbm with those two unlicensed subprograms removed from the source tree (pbmtolps and spottopgm), as I have been unable to locate the authors. To the best of my ability, nothing is using pbmtolps or spottopgm. In addition, we should probably remove the source code for jbigtopnm and pnmtojbig, even though we're not building the binaries.
man pbmtolps says the author is: George Phillips <phillips@cs.ubc.ca> and for spottopgm: Warren Toomey wkt@csadfa.cs.adfa.oz.au Will you try to contact them? I have no problem to remove the utilities though.
I did. Those email addresses are long since defunct. I was unable to locate current contact information for either author.
Ok, jbig, hpcd, spottopgm, pbmtolps stuff is history now. Thery are removed from tarballs including their man pages.
Found the author of spottopgm, he claims code is GPL. You can readd that to the tarball and include the binary. :)
Ok, hopefully other authors won't change their mind after a next few days ;) Fixed since 10.34-5.fc6.
And... the last author emerges. The license for pbmtolps is LGPL. Back to where we started (almost). :)
Ok, pbmtolps is now added.