copyright/license of CodeView.pdf

[Fabian-Gruenbichler]

Hi!

#2649 added a new debuginfo section to the guide that contains a PDF file - what's the licensing/copyright situation of that file?

atm it is part of the rust-src distribution and covered by the catch all

SPDX-FileCopyrightText = "The Rust Project Developers (see https://thanks.rust-lang.org)"
SPDX-License-Identifier = "MIT or Apache-2.0"

in REUSE.toml which seems unlikely.. the document itself doesn't contain any information either..

@Walnut356

[Walnut356]

Ah, that's a good point. I should have looked into that more. I'm pretty inexperienced so this isnt something i've ever really had to worry about. As i said in the original PR, i'm somewhat worried about this document becoming lost media.

From some extra searching, a more complete document can be found here. I'm having trouble finding any other sources for this document as well. There is a disclaimer at the beginning:

The TIS Committee grants you a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to use the information disclosed in the
Specifications to make your software TIS-compliant; no other license, express or implied, is granted or intended hereby.

I'm not a lawyer, so someone more familiar with these sorts of things will have to weigh in on that.

[Fabian-Gruenbichler]

IANAL (either), but that unfortunately sounds rather non-free to me - we are neither allowed to modify the document, nor are we allowed to use it for arbitrary purposes.

maybe putting a copy on archive.org and linking to it would be an option?

[wesleywiser]

My understanding is that while the document has a license which grants us the ability to read the document and use it to implement or interpret CodeView data, it does not give us the ability to relicense it. My recommendation would be to remove it and link to a copy on archive.org as @Fabian-Gruenbichler suggests and/or link to https://github.com/PascalBeyer/PDB-Documentation which itself links to the document and contains other useful information about the PDB/CodeView formats.

[Fabian-Gruenbichler]

I am not super familiar with the policies of archive.org, so I am not 100% sure it would be the right place, but I am sure it would be possible to find out :) I've worked around this on the Debian side by stripping the PDF in question and removing the reference to it for now.