On Fri, Mar 17 2023 at 03:43:41 PM -07:00:00, Soren Stoutner <so...@stoutner.com> wrote:
Package: chromium
Version: 111.0.5563.64-1
Severity: wishlist

Unicode produced a number of files years ago that contained a problematic license with the following restriction:

"Unicode, Inc. hereby grants the right to freely use the information supplied in this file in the creation of products supporting the Unicode Standard"

This is not free because it prevents the use of the file in ways that do not support the Unicode standard.

In 2004 Unicode relicensed their files under a different license that does not contain this restriction.

These is their current copyright and terms of use statement:

http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html

Which links to their current license:

https://www.unicode.org/license.txt

For many years, Chromium integrated an older copy of `Convert-UTF` with the problematic license. When the problem was brought to their attention they updated the file's license.

https://bugs.chromium.org/p/google-breakpad/issues/detail?id=270


Right, and debian's chromium is still carrying around a patch that works around that older problematic unicode license. I've been meaning to drop that patch.



https://chromium.googlesource.com/breakpad/breakpad/+/14bbefbd9600e08d6a34d7250faa8bc9dba2113e%5E%21/

The Debian Chromium package currently includes three other files that still contain this problematic license in their headers.

src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_10-1998.ucm
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_11-2001.ucm
src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_14-1998.ucm


Where are you seeing this?

dilinger@hm90:~$ grep -i "Unicode St" sid-build/chromium-111.0.5563.64/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_1* ; echo $?
1
dilinger@hm90:~$ head -n2 sid-build/chromium-111.0.5563.64/third_party/icu/source/data/mappings/iso-8859_10-1998.ucm
# Copyright (C) 2016 and later: Unicode, Inc. and others.
# License & terms of use: http://www.unicode.org/copyright.html




Even though these files are contained under the `chromium` subdirectory, they do not exist in the upstream Chromium git repository:

https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src.git/+/refs/heads/main/third_party/

I am uncertain where exactly they enter the stream of code that is packaged as Chromium on Debian. Wherever it is, they can be updated with the correct license.


Chromium's git repo doesn't include a bunch of third_party stuff; that stuff gets pulled in automatically when the chromium devs generate release tarballs. The directory in the release tarball documents where they originate. In this case, in third_party/icu/README.chromium . According to that, the source is from https://github.com/unicode-org/icu .






Identical files (except for the licenses) are found in the Unicode GitHub repository:

https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/tree/main/icu4c/source/data/mappings

These were updated to the non-problematic license in 2015:

https://unicode-org.atlassian.net/browse/ICU-22007

A copy of the bad license also appears in:

src/3rdparty/chromium/third_party/breakpad/breakpad/LICENSE

It needs to be removed, and, if breakpad uses the ICU files, replaced with the license at:


Yeah, breakpad's LICENSE file needs to be corrected. I can send a patch upstream for that.


https://www.unicode.org/license.txt

Qt WebEngine includes the same problematic files. There is an upstream bug filed with Qt at:

https://bugreports.qt.io/browse/QTBUG-112008

There is also a Lintian bug regarding the detection of this problematic license:

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=854209

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