chef / chef/chef-server

Legal bug: cpanminus-artistic.html cannot be distributed commercially

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Status: Untriaged
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

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. 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

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