cffi defective LICENSE information

[Lawrence Butcher]

The file “LICENSE” in the cffi-1.15.1.tar.gz file

from https://pypi.org/project/cffi/#files contains this text:

“    The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included

    in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.”

However, there is no “above copyright notice”.

The terms of the License cannot be met.

Therefore, NOONE can use this code based on the referenced MIT license.

There is no valid copyright notice elsewhere in the source code tree to help.

Please add the required copyright information to this defective LICENSE file.

Thanks

[Matthias Geier]

I cannot give legal advice, but I just wanted to mention that the Rust
project also removed that "copyright notice".

The notice was removed in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/43498
and there are some additional comments in
https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/2a8807e889a43c6b89eb6f2736907afa87ae592f

cheers,
Matthias

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[Armin Rigo]

Hi,

On Fri, 2 Sept 2022 at 17:16, Matthias Geier <matthia...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I cannot give legal advice, but I just wanted to mention that the Rust
> project also removed that "copyright notice".
>
> The notice was removed in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/43498
> and there are some additional comments in
> https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/2a8807e889a43c6b89eb6f2736907afa87ae592f

Thank you Matthias. I'll take that as meaning that cffi doesn't need
any fix, and Lawrence's conclusion "no-one can use cffi because of
this inconsistency" is not correct.



Armin

[Juan Jose Hasbun Wood]

Hello everyone,

I was setting up the licenses for a python project and also noticed the "incomplete" MIT license text on github, then came across this post.

I do not understand the outcome of the discurrion here https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/commit/2a8807e889a43c6b89eb6f2736907afa87ae592f though: should I use the license without stating the copyright? or do I have no possibility to use the software with a correct license?

I would really appreciate some clarification.

Best,

Juan

[Armin Rigo]

Hi,

I have opened https://github.com/python-cffi/cffi/pull/171 to fix that "issue".


Armin Rigo

[Matthias Geier]

Hi all.

I still cannot give legal advice, but since I brought up the Rust
project several years ago, let me give you a quick update:

Last year, in https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/pull/133461, they
re-added a copyright statement:

"""
Copyright (c) The Rust Project Contributors
"""

For some reason, they seem to still have left out the year, for
whatever that's worth.

Some additional discussion is available here:
https://github.com/rust-lang/leadership-council/issues/120

Note the comment
https://github.com/rust-lang/leadership-council/issues/120#issuecomment-2552691086,
which states:

"""
We checked in with the legal counsel regarding the MIT license. They
said that the copyright statement is optional, but still useful, and
they agreed with the proposal here.
"""

Note that I'm just relaying the information I found on Rust's GitHub
site, I don't have an opinion on this topic.

cheers,
Matthias

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[Juan Jose Hasbun Wood]

Thank you Matthias and Armin for your answers.

I am using v1.17.1 (only as a dependency of cryptography for python) and won't be able to wait for the pull request, so I will go ahead and use the license information delivered by pip-licenses (MIT License, no author named).

I have another question though: the license begins with the statement:

"Except when otherwise stated (look for LICENSE files in directories or
information at the beginning of each file) all software and
documentation is licensed as follows:"

Is there any file I need to be aware of? I looked through the repository and could not find anything with a different license, but the statement must be there for a reason?

Thank you in advance,

Juan

[Armin Rigo]

Hi Juan,

On Sun, 1 Jun 2025 at 13:21, Juan Jose Hasbun Wood
<ju...@hasbun-wood-engineering.de> wrote:
> "Except when otherwise stated (look for LICENSE files in directories or
> information at the beginning of each file) all software and
> documentation is licensed as follows:"
>
> Is there any file I need to be aware of? I looked through the repository and could not find anything with a different license, but the statement must be there for a reason?

There is "./src/c/libffi_x86_x64/LICENSE" on github. That's for
non-arm Windows only.

Armin Rigo