[fpc-devel] Forwarded message about FPC status

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Sat, 22 Dec 2012, ListMember wrote:

> On 2012-12-22 00:27, Sven Barth wrote:
>
>       Am 21.12.2012 22:20 schrieb "ListMember" <listmember at letterboxes.org>:
>       >
>
>       > Can you (or someone else, of course) think of a better search string to locate it?
>
>       Go to View Issues, click on the + before the search bix, click in the appearing entries in the top left for "reporter" and select the user "Inoussa
>       OUEDRAOGO" in the list (strangely the user exists twice, I used the first one) and click on Apply Filter. The second entry should be the correct one
>       (you should be able to judge this from the issue's description).
> 
> 
> Thank you for that detailed navigation; I got it now. [ http://mantis.freepascal.org/view.php?id=22909 ]
> 
> Does anyone know if the license issue has been discussed in any public maillist/wiki etc.
> 
> Reason I am asking is this: Having read (now and several times in the past) unicode.org's license [ http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html#Exhibit1 ] I simply
> cannot see what it is that is so (or, rather, at all) restrictive.

It would require every FPC made program to include the unicode license.
By itself maybe not a problem, but this contrasts with the fact that for 
years, you could make an FPC program without any additional licenses, 
if you didn't use any third-party libraries.

Inclusion in the RTL would make this an obligation for every FPC program.

However, last status/opinion is that this is only so if you were to copy 
the files verbatim. If the data contained in the files is somehow recoded, 
then it would probably not apply.

We didn't get any answers to our inquiries. But we found that Delphi also 
uses these files, and they put forward the above argument on the Delphi 
forums when Paul Ishenin inquired.

It boils down to: Only the form is copyrighted, not the actual data.

We hope they are right, otherwise every Delphi program as of Delphi 2009
is in violation of the unicode license :-)

Note that I am not a lawyer, the above are therefor not rigorous legal truths.

Michael.