Bug#980212: gnome-screensaver may have dubious copyright provenance

[Dennis Filder]

Package: gnome-screensaver
Severity: normal

Dear Maintainer,

under [1] the author of XScreenSaver (BSD license) claims that one of
the authors of gnome-screensaver copied his code and replaced the
original licensing and copyright information with a GPL-2 stanza and
added his own copyright statement in the process.  Thus probably all
versions of gnome-screensaver are affected, and the originating
version would be either XSS 4.23, 4.24, 5.00 or 5.01 as those were the
releases made in 2006, the earliest year in the GPL-2 copyright
stanza.

A quick comparison of gnome-screensaver/src/gs-grab-x11.c and
xscreensaver-5.45+dfsg1/driver/lock.c appears to corroborate this:
xfree_lock_grab_smasher() in XSS and xorg_lock_smasher_set_active() in
GSS are preceded by an identical comment and have common variable
names.  I haven't looked further into this, but I wouldn't be
surprised if a lot more was copied.

Furthermore, cinnamon-screensaver and mint-screensaver are affected by
the same issue since they are apparently forks of gnome-screensaver.

It seems advisable to consult debian-legal to see how big of a problem
this is and if it renders these packages undistributable.


Regards.

1: https://www.jwz.org/blog/2021/01/i-told-you-so-2021-edition/