[sane-devel] license issues with sane-backends/lib/* files

[Henning Meier-Geinitz]

Hi,

On Sat, Feb 23, 2002 at 01:47:15PM +0300, Sergey Vlasov wrote:
> I have noticed some licensing problems with sane-backends/lib/*
> files.
[...]
> One way to fix the problem is to remove getopt.o, getopt1.o and
> md5.o from the definition of LIBLIB_FUNCS in
> backends/Makefile.in:
> 
> LIBLIB_FUNCS = $(basename @LIBOBJS@ @ALLOCA@)
> 
> This also fixes the problem with namespace pollution (in the
> 2002-02-21 CVS version "make libcheck" fails for all backends,
> complaining about the md5_* functions).

Thanks for mentioning this. I have changed this in CVS. At least the
addition of "md5.(l)o" was done by me by mistake. It hasn't been there
before my change to lib/Makefile.in.

> This still leaves a confusing situation with sanei_auth.c, which
> is under GNU GPL with SANE exception, but depends on md5.c
> without such exception.  Taking a version of md5.c from glibc
> (which is under LGPL) will remove the problem at least for
> linking with a shared library (static linking will still be
> problematic).  Another option is to take the equivalent code
> from FreeBSD (this will require more work).  Or we may just do
> nothing about this, as long as the code is not used by any
> backend (currently only saned needs it).

Even if it's used by a backend, the only problem is that the
SANE-exception isn't true any more for that backend. There are some
backends that don't have this exception at all.

But you are right that we should make this apect more clear. I will
add a TODO entry.

Bye,
  Henning