James jSPF have asked about the Python license

• Key: LEGAL-13
• Type: Question
• Status: Closed
• Resolution: Fixed
• Priority: Major
• Assignee: Unassigned
• Reporter: Henri Yandell

Comments

[Sam Ruby]

While I don't see anything obviously objectionable with the Python license, I would appreciate some clarification: is jSPF contemplating shipping Python itself, some Python source, or some non-Python code that happens to be licensed under the Python license?

Depending (but not shipping) on an external python module that can be installed by easy_install or the like would be OK, shipping Python source (but not Python itself) is likely OK, shipping Python itself may require more investigation.

[Stefano Bagnara]

The python licensed resources are yaml text files and other descriptors used in the test suite.
spf-group publish a test suite and the core test definition file is a yaml file: we include it in our test folder because we written junit tests to read that resource.
http://www.openspf.org/svn/project/test-suite/rfc4408-tests.yml
http://www.openspf.org/svn/project/test-suite/pyspf-tests.yml

In past we even had to slightly alter that resource file to accomplish some lack in our yaml parser, but now we simply include the resource as is.

We have 3-4 of this files. We managed to have the most importat one to be clearly licensed under a liberal license some month ago, and they added this file to their test suite (previously there was no license definition for that ant we had to use the one included in the python spf implementation distributed under the python license): http://www.openspf.org/svn/project/test-suite/rfc4408-tests.LICENSE

Here is our current NOTICE snippet for that dependencies (different from what we had when we made this question to legal-discuss):

===============================
This product contains resources (SPF parser tests: test_parser.txt
and test_rfc_examples.txt) derived from the libspf2 library
(http://www.libspf2.org/) and distributed under the BSD license
and copyright by Wayne Schlitt, Shevek.
(see src\test\resources\org\apache\james\jspf\libspf2.LICENSE)

This product contains resources (rfc4408-tests.yml) from the
openspf group, distributed under the BSD license and copyright
by Stuart D. Gathman and Julian Mehnle.
(see src\test\resources\org\apache\james\jspf\rfc4408-tests.LICENSE)

This product contains resources (tests.yml, pyspf-tests.yml)
from the pyspf library (http://cheeseshop.python.org/pypi/pyspf)
distributed under the Python Software Foundation License and
copyright by Terence Way, Stuart Gathman ([e-mail]) and
Scott Kitterman.
(see src\test\resources\org\apache\james\jspf\pyspf.LICENSE)
===============================

Our PMC approved a release (http://james.apache.org/jspf/index.html - Apache jSPF 0.9.6) based including the above NOTICE and python licensed files (while you see that some of them are now BSD).

[Henri Yandell]

Looks like this is fine. It's not Python itself.