iLBC license issue

[Mark Purcell]

On Saturday 18 March 2006 13:13, Jan Janak wrote:
> kphone (and maybe other packages) contain iLBC (internet Low Bitrate Codec)
> library. This library has been published as part of RFC3951 by the IETF.

Hi Jan,

Yes this is an big issue:

http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/pkg-voip-maintainers/2005-October/002711.html
http://lists.debian.org/debian-legal/2005/10/msg00000.html
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=331318
http://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_id=8528430&forum_id=45235

I don't think we (Debian) have addressed it adequately yet ;-(

That said it is mainly an upstream issue for openh323, kphone and asterisk. 
Can anyone check opal?

All three include the ilbc code, with various interpertations of the licencing 
issues for ilbc. and then claim their entire package is under the respective 
licence.

http://www.openh323.org/pipermail/openh323/2003-May/061142.html

They are all using the same library code, so it would make sense for Debian to 
ship an libilbc{-dev} package, which would contain all the licence issues, 
and then for the other packages to link to that package.

That said.  For kiax we actually removed the ilbc code alltogether to get it 
into the archive.  

We could always make DFSG compliant versions of openh323, asterisk and kphone 
by stripping the ilbc code from the .orig.tar we ship.

Comments..

Mark

>
> The copyright owner of that code is Global IP Sound and the license of the
> code is not GPL compatible. The license requires that derived work must
> be backwards compatible with the original specification. This is more
> restrictive than GPL.
>
> I am wondering whether the people on the list are aware of this ? The
> copyright file in kphone package says that it is released under the terms
> of GPL, but I wonder if this is true when iLBC is included ? Shouldn't
> kphone be moved in non-free ?
>
> http://www.ilbcfreeware.org/documentation/gips_iLBClicense.pdf
>
>   Jan.
>
>
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