===============================================

                                 Mar 9th, 2007

                      Written by Mamoru Tasaka

                 <mtasaka@ioa.s.u-tokyo.ac.jp>  

  Clarification of the license of mecab-ipadic

  on Fedora

===============================================

The English version of the license of mecab-ipadic 

(which is included as "LICENSE.en" in this rpm )

contains the part which came from ICOT Free software 

license, which contains the following paragraph.

-----------------------------------------------

Each User may also freely distribute the Program, whether in its

original form or modified, to any third party or parties, PROVIDED

that the provisions of Section 3 ("NO WARRANTY") will ALWAYS appear

on, or be attached to, the Program, which is distributed substantially

in the same form as set out herein and that such intended

distribution, if actually made, will neither violate or otherwise

contravene any of the laws and regulations of the countries having

jurisdiction over the User or the intended distribution itself.

-----------------------------------------------

At the time I was writing this document, debian regarded

mecab-ipadic as NON-free as they judged this paragraph problematic.

So I asked Mr. Tom "spot" Callaway if this software can be 

legally accepted, and he asked FSF (The Free Software 

Foundation) if they can accept this license as free.

The opinion of FSF on this passage was as below.

-----------------------------------------------

Debian's beef is with the following paragraph of the license:

<This part is the same as the above paragraph>

They have two complaints.  I've given my thoughts on both, but I can't

make a final determination on either; that would be for RMS and Eben.

* They believe that when the license talks about something being

  "distributed substantially in the same form as set out herein," it's

  referring to the program -- implying that you can't radically alter 

  the software (i.e., take a piece of it and incorporate it in some   

  totally different software).  I understand why they think that.  On 

  the other hand, I'm skeptical that this is the licensor's intent; I 

  think they just want to keep you from messing up the warranty 

  disclaimer too much. Unusually for Debian, apparently nobody tried to 

  clear this up with the original authors.  It might be worthwhile to 

  try that.  As it stands, I think we'd want to steer clear as well, as 

  we did with the original Artistic license.

* They object to the requirement that you follow the law.  I'm not sure 

  if we have a general policy on this, but I know we've accepted similar

  restrictions as being free before (the Intel Open Source License has

  similar, though narrower, language), so I think we would still 

  consider the license free as well even with this text.

If you can get some kind of clarification on the first point, I'd be

happy to escalate this for further discussion.

-----------------------------------------------

So Mr Callaway asked me to clarify the intend of the original author

with respect to the word "substantially".

However, according to the original Japanese version of

this license (which is included as "LICENSE.jp.html" in this rpm), 

the part of the license which corresponds to the ICOT license

paragraph, which contains the words "substantially", reads 

as below (in English):

-----------------------------------------------

Each user of this program may freely use, modify and make a copy of

this program. "To modify this program" used herein includes

* to improve or to extend this program to make it better its

  function, performance, and the quality

* to add programs and documents you created by yourself,

however, it ("to modify this program") is not limited to the above.

Each user of this program may distribute to others

this program itself, or the modified version of this program,

provided

* the section three ("no warranty") of this license is

  included in it,

freely as long as the distribution won't violate the laws

which may relate to the distribution.

-----------------------------------------------

So as mecab developers mention, who maintain mecab-ipadic 

software currently, and also in my opinion, it does not seem 

to appear in the Japanese license the part which corresponds to 

the words "substantially in the same form".  And in the Japanese 

license it is mentioned what to call "the modified version", which

declares that the original developer imposes no limitation

for modifying this software.

Mr Callaway finally declared this license OK for Fedora

on Mar 8th, 2007.

-----------------------------------------------

This is good. Add a text file which says exactly what you just said as

LICENSE.Fedora, include it in %doc, and it is ok for Fedora.

~spot

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