Some help needed

[Chuck Swiger]

On Jan 9, 2007, at 3:00 PM, M. Warner Losh wrote:
> : OK.  It would be useful to mention the name of this tool, or put it
> : into the ports tree, so other people can track it down more easily.
>
> The tool can be http://people.freebsd.org/~imp/extract-contrib- 
> string.pl
> and is at this point a verbatim copy of the same file somewhere in
> NetBSD (I forget the exact path).  This tool requires some hand-touch
> ups after the fact...

Right, OK, I see what it is doing.

It's got a useful set of alternate forms of the "clause-3" phrasing  
as Perl regexes to better catch some of the variant license text, and  
it's smarter about figuring out where clause-3 ends by looking for  
the various forms of clause-4 ("The name of the author may not be  
used to endorse") than my simple one-liner shell script.

It's also checking them against this master file (src/distrib/notes/ 
common/legal.common) and only generating output if the existing phase  
it is looking at is not already present.  It seems to keep these  
entries in NROFF/TROFF format (".It" entries), and you have to merge  
the stuff it generates into the master file by hand.

> :> it needs a little refinement to deal with a couple of special cases
> :> and to change its output from troff to sgml.  btw, what is  
> advertising?
> :> nobody knows...
> :
> : The US FTC has some definitions and rules about what constitutes
> : advertising:
> :
> : http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/dotcom/index.html
>
> Well, I'm more concerned about when they are triggered, since the
> language is a little unclear "All advertising materials mentioning
> features or use of the this software must display..."  How direct does
> the link have to be?

It seems clear that you don't need to have a direct mention of a  
specific piece of software for the clause to be applicable.

For example, both Microsoft and Apple use parts of IPFW in their  
respective products; because they advertise the security benefits of  
having a firewall included with the OS, both of them provide an  
acknowledgment to Luigi Rizzo, even though at least the former calls  
the firewall by another name entirely.

> If I mention networking, do I have to mention
> the tcp, udp, ip stacks?  The ethernet driver?  The vm code necessary
> to have a running system at all?  If one says it is a berekely unix,
> does that trigger all the advertising clauses, or just the ones that
> were in 4.4 BSD?

Claiming that a system is based on Berkeley Unix probably does not  
qualify as advertising, and anything Copyright'ed to the Regents or  
contributors would not be a problem at this point due to the waiver  
of the advertising clause.

The area of concern lies with code which is licensed under the old  
BSD license directly in the name of the author or their company  
rather than licensed as a contributor to BSD.  Claiming that you  
should purchase FreeBSD because it comes with sendmail or an advanced  
TCP/IP network stack would obligate you to credit Eric Allman, Bill  
Paul, or various other folks respectively.  :-)

> Since the FreeBSD project doesn't do any explicit
> advertising, we really don't have to do anything if we wanted to take
> as narrow a reading of the above clause as possible...

Agreed.  Of course, FreeBSD comes with the complete sources for all  
software which is part of the base or contrib, including the full  
original license text and acknowledgment, so it's not as if the  
FreeBSD project is doing anything to conceal or misattribute the  
various authors work.

> Having said that, I think it is our duty to produce the list for
> others to use.  If we have it, and we have links to it (maybe ok, but
> how one must display the text is also vague), then we'd be good even
> on a rediculously expansive reading of the phrase...

I would agree that FreeBSD should make a best-effort attempt to list  
all of the contributors in the form their software licenses request--  
ie, I believe that you ought to provide a statement like:

"This product includes software developed by Bill Paul."

...with the advertising materials that make reference to the  
"advanced TCP/IP networking stack" of FreeBSD (presuming for the sake  
of discussion that such materials exist).

> : ...as for the output format, I'd try to generate a plaintext list of
> : acknowledgement statements drawn from the licenses, and then worry
> : about converting them to SGML and from there to whatever other  
> output
> : format is desired.
>
> Works for me.

OK.  It wouldn't be hard to modify Hubert's script to keep things in  
plaintext rather than in NROFF, although it might be worth pinging  
him to try and agree upon a direction and goals for his script rather  
than just hacking it for today's objective.  :-)

-- 
-Chuck