Legal bug: cpanminus-artistic.html cannot be distributed commercially
Nobody has claimed this yet.
- Dominant language
- Erlang
- Stars
- 303
- Forks
- 211
- Avg merge
- 1d 8h
- Merged PRs (30d)
- 5
Description
Chef Server Version
Chef Infra Server 15.10.33 - chef-server-core_15.10.33-1_amd64.deb
Platform Details
Ubuntu 22.04 - self-hosted ESXi.
Configuration
Standalone
Scenario
I'm not sure I am using the right issue template, but this seems to be the least wrong one, although the "bug" is of a legal nature, not technical.
I got a request from a guy in the license department of my customer, who is doing a thorough license compliance review of all their open source software. And they came across the Chef Server and peeked into /opt/opscode/LICENSES, where they discovered a file called cpanminus-artistic.html. Now the file describes a license that the compliance guy approves, but the file itself seems to originate from here: https://dev.perl.org/licenses/artistic.html
And if you scroll to the bottom of the file, it's marked with a content license and a link to https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/us/
Compliance guy tells me that this is problematic, because you cannot distribute the artistic.html file commercially due to that little icon in the bottom left, probably based on a site-wide perl.org HTML template.
So the question is ... can the Infra server be packaged with a pure txt version of that artistic license, so the copyright notice from perl.org is not included. And if so - where to make that change?
I was looking into the source code for chef-server and I got to this line:
https://github.com/chef/chef-server/blob/main/omnibus/config/software/perl_pg_driver.rb#L24
But I don't have familiarity with omnibus internals or perl, so I'm not sure exactly which change to make here. Can you shed some light on this? Is there something I can do? If my customer's compliance guy is right, then I guess Progress is also violating the terms of that HTML template, by including it in the distribution of Chef Infra.
Steps to Reproduce
N/A
Expected Result
No offending HTML license file in LICENSES/cpanminus-artistic.html
Actual Result
There is an offending HTML license file in LICENSES/cpanminus-artistic.html
Contributor guide
First steps
- Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
- Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
- Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
- Open a pull request that references the issue number.
Research direction
Start at omnibus/config/software/perl_pg_driver.rb around line 24 and trace how cpanminus-artistic.html is sourced and packaged into /opt/opscode/LICENSES. Done means the Chef Infra Server package contains a text-only Artistic License without the commercially restricted HTML template.
Written by the indexing model from the issue text.
Assessment
- Tech stack
- perl
- Domain
- build-system
- Issue type
- Bug
- Difficulty
- 3/5
- Estimated time
- 1-2 days
- Activity status
- Stale
- Clarity
- Mostly clear
- Newbie friendliness
- 42/100