Spec URL: http://home.bawue.de/~ixs/perl-IP-Country/perl-IP-Country.spec SRPM URL: http://home.bawue.de/~ixs/perl-IP-Country/perl-IP-Country-2.23-1.fc7.src.rpm Description: IP::Country allows fast lookups of IP addresses and their corresponding countries based on available regional NIC data. Although the country of assignment will probably be the country associated with a large ISP rather than the client herself, this is probably good enough for most log analysis applications, and under test has proved to be as accurate as reverse-DNS and WHOIS lookup.
The copyrights for the databases look rather non-free to me; see http://search.cpan.org/dist/IP-Country/lib/IP/Country.pm. I don't actually see the databases included in the package, but the manpage says "derived from" and I'm not enough of a lawyer to tell if the package is actually free of those copyrights. Has this package been looked over and been declared OK? If not, perhaps this should block FE-Legal.
The database copyright is not exactly free. But that should not be a problem for fedora as the databases are not shipped. The package does contain the scripts to generate a local cached copy of the database dump though. These scripts are packaged as docs in the utils subpackage. I do not consider this a FE-LEGAL blocker though. Would you agree?
On a closer look, the *.gif files are no images as I first assumed but are the data files... I guess the better solution would be to drop these and just package a script generating these from the source...
I was wondering what .gif files were doing in a perl module. But if you remove them, what use is the module? We do have other packages which will download data which is not free enough for us to distribute, but that data is still free to use, whereas this data is not even free to use in all circumstances. So, yeah, I do think input is needed, either from legal or from one of the various committees.
I guess I forgot to set the legal blocker here; I'll do that now.
Asking the lawyers on this one.
Red Hat Legal agrees with me that the database licenses are non-free. I think this one is dead in the water, sorry.