CEF Licensing

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CEF Licensing

Postby Bailywick » Wed Aug 02, 2017 6:43 am

I'm evaluating CEF for use in a commercial project, but it will have to go through our OSS office and I'm trying to make the job as easy as possible for them (to increase it's chance of approval). I've been going through all the licences in "about://credits" and assessing them. I've seen similar questions around, but hopefully I can be a bit more specific about the components I'm unsure of (for the moment I'm only interested in the windows platform if that makes any difference).

In particular I've come across XZ which appears to have quite complex licensing. About credits says:
"See http://src.chromium.org/viewvc/chrome/trunk/deps/third_party/xz/COPYING"

If you follow the link you'll see a few bits are GPL:
[*]A set of scripts that are "GNU GPLv2+"
[*]The the Build system is "GNU GPLv2+ or GNU GPLv3+"

It does make it clear that anything built using the build system isn't restricted to GPL but you can see from the chromium repository that it the GPL scripts (all the build scripts I can see apear to be public domain, but I haven't gone through it exhaustively).

But I'm not sure how it's all linked together. Does it include all the code in the repository (and thus include GPL code)? Or does it somehow only link to liblzma which is Public domain?
Any input would be appreciated.
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Re: CEF Licensing

Postby magreenblatt » Wed Aug 02, 2017 11:00 am

Except perhaps for the liblzma library the "XZ Utils" do not appear to be compiled into CEF/Chromium on Windows: https://cs.chromium.org/search/?q=%22XZ ... um&type=cs
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Re: CEF Licensing

Postby Bailywick » Thu Aug 03, 2017 5:05 am

Thanks for the link, that code search is very handy, and I'm sure will help a lot with my work. Although I have to admit I'm still having trouble parsing the results. It appears that it is only used as part of the build process? But if this is the case, why is it in the about page?

I've also got a bit further and it seems like NewLib-Extras could also be problematic
The newlib and libgloss subdirectories are a collection of software from

several sources, each wi6h [sic] their own copyright and license. See the file

COPYING.NEWLIB for details. The rest of the release tree is under either

the GNU GPL or LGPL licenses.


The copying file isn't much more illuminating, so I looked through the code in the chromium repository: It looks like the only files are headers that do have an ok licence. Again it appears this might be part of the build chain.

In both cases (xz utils and newlib-extras) it appears to use the full library (not just the checked in code) for part of the build, and I'm not sure how that affects (or doesn't affect) the licence the built product. I know there's a specific GCC exemption GPL licence so that code compiled with the GCC isn't GPL, which implies to me that tools without a similar exemption could pass on their GPL if used.
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Re: CEF Licensing

Postby magreenblatt » Thu Aug 03, 2017 10:40 am

Currently the about:credits page contains all licenses in the Chromium source repository. The about:credits page will eventually be filtered to only include licenses for software compiled into the binary. That work is being tracked in https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/is ... ?id=178215.
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Re: CEF Licensing

Postby Bailywick » Tue Aug 08, 2017 5:14 am

Thanks for the input, It's been very useful. It's now with our legal office to look into the details after I've hopefully made it as easy to process as possible. I'll try and update this topic with the results if and when they arrive (might be a while though).
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