Question concerning License of PyASN's ancestors

[dmth]

Hi,
I've got a Question concerning the License of PyASN's ancestors:
Is there any code left from the mrtd-project which was licensed under 4-Clause BSD?

Because clause 3 would be interesting to manage:

• 3. All advertising materials mentioning features or use of
• this software must display the following acknowledgement:
  *
• This product includes software developed by the University of
• Michigan, Merit Network, Inc., and their contributors.

BR dmth

[hadiasghari]

Hi @dmth, a few updates on this:

I checked the specific file you mention (_radix.c), and talked with a FOSS licensing expert. The inclusion is fine in pyasn given its referenced in both source and documentation. But the 'advertising' clause is indeed restrictive and might cause issues for derivative projects. I further contacted the chain of authors of the code to see if they can release it with another license; it turns out that indeed it originates in MRT which I am next going to contact.

BR Hadi

[dmth]

Hadi, thank you very much for your efforts!

[sebix]

Is there any progress on this?

[hadiasghari]

Hi @dmth , @sebix . I've filed an open issue with the MRT project (see: deepfield/MRT#1).

[hadiasghari]

Deepfield has not responded to the issue or email contact. So @dmth @sebix, shall we close this issue, try to find another way to contact them, or leave it be for now?

[sebix]

This is blocking any kind of bundling and/or shipping this software. If this is not solved, we are forced to switch the backend for certtools/intelmq, which I'd like to avoid if possible.

It therefore blocks #20

[jkrauska]

Without knowing anything about the code you're using -- are these viable alternatives without the same restrictions?

BSD
https://github.com/freebsd/freebsd/blob/master/sys/net/radix.c

Apple Variant
https://opensource.apple.com/source/xnu/xnu-1699.24.8/bsd/net/radix.c

I too would love to have a Debian package (#20).

[sebix]

First one should be no problem at all, then both the python and the c code have MIT.

Second uses [APSL-2.0]. This is incompatible with GPL. Tough it's problematic, linking it from code with other licences is allowed

[jkrauska]

Neglecting the licenses -- Does the MIT licensed code provide similar capabilities? I sadly admit that I only have a basic understanding of what a radix tree is -- and I haven't looked at how pyasn or MRTs use them at all.

[sebix]

I guess I have less knowledge on this topic than you have.

[hadiasghari]

The radix tree is a fundamental part of the module. It's what enables the longest prefix to be matched. Changing it is possible, but it would require much testing for both correctness and performance issues. So I guess we should try to reach-out to DeepField via other ways.

Btw, @sebix , the FOSS lawyer I talked with said that the advertising clause only holds if the particular functionality is your product's main functionality.