[packman] New packages for packman (Walter Fey)

[Richard Brown]

On Tue 1. Aug 2017 at 20:42, Luigi Baldoni <aloisio at gmx.com> wrote:

> Sent: Tuesday, August 01, 2017 at 6:02 PM
> From: "Richard Brown" <RBrownCCB at opensuse.org>
> > I would hope the answer is "no"
> >
> > If Packman receives packages which clearly remove the legal copyright
> attribution of previous authors, Packman would
> > need to be prepared for serious conversations with the copyright holder
> who's attributions are being removed.
> >
> > This is a very serious situation which fundamentally undermines the
> legal basis under which free and open source
> > licenses operate, so is taken very seriously by corporations that run
> their business in compliance with those
> > licenses.
>
> No. I was talking about the copyring attribution for the spec file itself,
> with which I seem to recall
> from a previous interaction OP has a problem with.
>
> Now, I assume that a commercial entity like SUSE can't afford to
> distribute anything where the IP is not
> clearly defined, even for a mere script.
>
> Would Packman be more lenient in that regard?
>
> Regard
>
>
I don't know if Packman would be lenient or not in the scenario you pose,
but that isn't relevant to the actual risk with Mr. Feys proposed
comtributions.

The behaviour with Walter alludes to in his post was a clear, demonstrable
case of Mr. Fey taking sources (in this case spec files) and reusing the
spec file, in whole or in part, while simultaneously removing the copyright
header from those spec files.

The spec files were all licensed under licenses such as the GPL and MIT
which require all copyright attribution to be preserved as part of the
license for reuse and redistribution.

Mr. Feys insistence to remove the copyright attribution while reusing
source which clearly derived from clearly attributed specfiles is a clear
breach of the licenses involved and in the interest of the copyright
holders, the upstream projects who chose the licenses in use, and all open
source projects the openSUSE Board requested Mr Fey cease that behaviour.

Mr Fey now seems to seek to use Packman and his posts imply he might intend
to do so in the same manner in which he chose to use the openSUSE Build
service.

If that is the case, this could be a serious issue for the Packman build
service. If the sources involved include files derived from those
copyrighted to SUSE Linux GmbH it is likely that SUSE will notice (after
all, I have read this thread) and it is certainly likely we will be
compelled to take action to protect our copyright and the redistribution
license of the packages in question.

And that's a situation I really, sincerely hope we can avoid so hope that
Packman has suitable processes and options in place to ensure the licenses
and copyrights of their contributions are as checked as they reasonably can
be before hosting and redistributing the resulting binaries.

Regards,

- R

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