[X2Go-Dev] [pkg-x2go-devel] Bug#784565: Bug#784565: nx-libs-lite: parts are derived from non-free code

[Mike Gabriel]

Dear Brian, dear Zachary, dear Gian Filippo,

(Find a TL;DR; at the end of this mail...)

I am contacting you on a licensing issue related to the DXPC code that  
you worked on at the end of the nineties. I'd highly appreciate it if  
you could take a little time to read this mail and get back to me,  
either privately or in public.
[I have actually Cc:ed quite a number of people in this mail (thread).  
All of them will be affected by the outcome of this license issue to  
some lesser or greater extent. If you feel inconvenient with replying  
to so many people you don't know, really don't hesitate to get back to  
me in private first, so that we can sort things out. Thank you.]

Before I continue, let me shortly introduce myself. My name is Mike  
Gabriel, I work for the Debian project [1.1, 1.2] (which brings forth  
one of the major GNU/Linux distributions world-wide. I am also the  
upstream code maintainer of a software project called nx-libs [2]. The  
nx-libs code has been derived from several of NoMachine's NXv3 [11]  
components (namely: nx-X11, nxagent, nxcomp, nxcompext and nxcompshad).

A member of the Debian legal team [3] (Francesco Poli) made us (i.e.,  
the nx-libs developers, users, package maintainers) aware of an issue  
[4] in the nx-libs component NXCOMP (which has been derived from DXPC  
[5]). Please read Message #5 of the brought up issue on the Debian bug  
tracker (#784565) [4] before you continue reading. Thanks.

I will now jump into the below quoted mail and continue inline...

On  Di 12 Mai 2015 23:40:48 CEST, Francesco Poli wrote:

> On Tue, 12 May 2015 17:41:55 +0200 Mike Gabriel wrote:
>
>> Hi Kevin,
>
> Hello Mike, hello Kevin, hello to all the other recipients.
>
> First of all, I wish to express my gratitude to Kevin for his prompt,
> kind and generous response.

>> thanks for your feedback. Let us wait for Francesco, our expert on  
>> license issues, and see what he thinks about your feedback.
>
> I think that this is an important first step to solve this issue for
> the best.
> Kevin Vigor is one of the copyright owners of the code that was forked
> before the re-licensing.
> We now know that he intended the re-licensing to be retroactive and
> this is really good.

We are currently in the process of contacting all DXPC related  
copyright holders mentioned in the NXCOMP license file [6]. We already  
received some feedback from Kevin Vigor [7], but we also need to  
address you (Brian, Zachary, Gian Filippo) with this. (The mail  
address I have from Zachary may be outdated, so any current contact  
address is highly welcome, in case the mail address being used will  
bounce back).

At the moment, NXCOMP (and thus nx-libs, but also NoMachine's NXv3  
code) cannot be considered as fully free software, until this issue is  
settled. The DXPC license before DXPC v3.8.1 was an ancient BSD style  
license that failed in explicitly mentioning, that it is allowed to  
modify the DXPC code in derivative works. In 2002, DXPC 3.8.1 got  
released [12], using a more compliant license (BSD-2-clause). As Kevin  
told us, this license change [8,9] was done after the FSF [10] had  
contacted the DXPC developers.

However, the NXCOMP code in NXv3 got forked from DXPC before 2002, as  
it seems. So unfortunately, the modifications of DXPC as found in  
NoMachine's NXCOMP product are not compliant with the pre-3.8.1  
license of DXPC.

> I think that now it would be useful to ascertain that the other
> copyright owners (Brian Pane, Zachary Vonler, Gian Filippo Pinzari) are
> also OK with this interpretation of the re-licensing operation.

TL;DR; So here comes my actual question: are you (Brian Pane, Zachary  
Vonler, Gian Filippo Pinzari) ok with retroactively regarding  
pre-3.8.1 code of DXPC (that you probably all worked on at that time)  
as BSD-2-clause? Are you ok with others having taken or taking the  
pre-3.8.1 DXPC code and distribute it in a modified form?

A yes from all of you as DXPC copyright holders is essential for the  
continuation of nx-libs development under a free license. This may  
also possibly be an issue for NXv4 in case parts of it have been  
derived from DXPC.

Thanks to all of you for taking your time.

light+love
Mike

[1.1] http://www.debian.org
[1.2] https://qa.debian.org/developer.php?login=sunweaver%40debian.org
[2] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs
[3] https://www.debian.org/legal/
[4] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565#5
[5] http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/
[6] https://github.com/ArcticaProject/nx-libs/blob/3.6.x/nxcomp/LICENSE#L32
[7] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=784565#40
[8] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=72020
[9] https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=142028
[10] http://www.fsf.org/
[11] https://www.nomachine.com/version-3
[12] http://www.vigor.nu/dxpc/CHANGES
-- 

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