Hi,
I'm updating the License tag in the spec file of my packages.
Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses: mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public License. According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
What should I use in the License tag??
'pybliographer' is GPLv2+ but installs gnome documentation files with GFDL. Should I use 'License: GPLv2+ and GFDL' in this case?
Zoltan
On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 09:11:21AM +0200, Zoltan Kota wrote:
I'm updating the License tag in the spec file of my packages.
Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses: mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public License. According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
What should I use in the License tag??
GNU Lesser General Public License is a name of the license that was introduced for LGPL2.1, before that (e.g. LGPL2) it was called GNU Library General Public License. I think in License: we aren't supposed to differentiate between LGPL2 and LGPL2.1, so both licenses are to be tagged with LGPLv2 resp. LGPLv2+, depending on if they allow any later version or not.
Jakub
Zoltan Kota wrote:
Hi,
I'm updating the License tag in the spec file of my packages.
Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses: mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public License. According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
What should I use in the License tag??
The license tag should represent the license of the binaries in a sub-package, so first you need you need to find out which binary gets build from which source files.
Usually when there are both GPL and LGPL licensed source files, there is both a lib and a few utilities. So you could have for example:
/usr/bin/foo, build from 5 GPLv2+ files and one LGPLv2+ file -> its GPLv2+ /usr/lib/libfoo.so.0, build from 3 LGPLv2+ files -> its LGPLv2+
Now if you both of these in the same package then the package gets:
License: GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+
As it has binaries under 2 different licences in the package
However it is recommended in this case to split of a -utils or a -libs, lets say you split of a -libs, then the main package tags (top of file) would have: License: GPLv2+
Since the main package contains the GPL utils
And then further on:
%package libs ... License: LGPLv2+
This split is both good to save diskspace when another package depends on the lib, and it will help the automatic license checker which is planned to be written to check cross package license issues.
'pybliographer' is GPLv2+ but installs gnome documentation files with GFDL. Should I use 'License: GPLv2+ and GFDL' in this case?
Yes.
Regards,
Hans
On Wed, Aug 22, 2007 at 09:24:48AM +0200, Hans de Goede wrote:
However it is recommended in this case to split of a -utils or a -libs, lets say you split of a -libs, then the main package tags (top of file) would have: License: GPLv2+
Splitting a package just because of different licenses is very bad idea.
Jakub
On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Hans de Goede wrote:
Zoltan Kota wrote:
Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses: mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public License. According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
What should I use in the License tag??
/usr/bin/foo, build from 5 GPLv2+ files and one LGPLv2+ file -> its GPLv2+ /usr/lib/libfoo.so.0, build from 3 LGPLv2+ files -> its LGPLv2+
Now if you both of these in the same package then the package gets:
License: GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+
As it has binaries under 2 different licences in the package
As much as I could figure out both the util and the lib are built from GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+ source files. So they and the package itself are GPLv2+, aren't they?
Zoltan
Zoltan Kota wrote:
On Wed, 22 Aug 2007, Hans de Goede wrote:
Zoltan Kota wrote:
Checking the source files of 'recode' I found the following licenses: mostly GPLv2+, LGPLv2+, and in some files GNU Library General Public License. According to gnu.org the GNU Library General Public License has been succeeded by the GNU Lesser General Public License.
What should I use in the License tag??
/usr/bin/foo, build from 5 GPLv2+ files and one LGPLv2+ file -> its GPLv2+ /usr/lib/libfoo.so.0, build from 3 LGPLv2+ files -> its LGPLv2+
Now if you both of these in the same package then the package gets:
License: GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+
As it has binaries under 2 different licences in the package
As much as I could figure out both the util and the lib are built from GPLv2+ and LGPLv2+ source files. So they and the package itself are GPLv2+, aren't they?
Yes that would be the case then.
Regards,
Hans