Re: Using LGPLv3+ license for libgnutls?

[Joe Orton]

On Tue, Sep 09, 2008 at 01:46:17PM -0400, Daniel Kahn Gillmor wrote:
> On Tue 2008-09-09 12:01:23 -0400, Simon Josefsson wrote:
> 
> > I tried to do some systematic searches, but the debian copyright
> > information tends to be incorrect (not mentioning versions) or difficult
> > to parse.
> 
> This is sadly true.  Automatic resolution of this sort of question
> would be much easier if the machine-readable debian/copyright proposal
> was more widely-adopted:
> 
>  http://wiki.debian.org/Proposals/CopyrightFormat

We have such a standard agreed at Fedora but the hard work is really in 
auditing N thousand packages to meet it.

> > I recognize cups, snort and ekg, and they are fairly well known.
> 
> fwiw, gobby seems to be GPL-2+, not GPL-2, at least according to the
> debian copyright info, so it's possilbe that the fedora tags are wrong
> on that package:

I agree, good catch, thanks; I've filed a bug to get this fixed in 
Fedora.

> And cups appears to be ambiguous as far as the GPL'ed bits (though the
> LGPL'ed bits are pretty clearly V2-only):
>
> [0 address@hidden ~]$ grep -A6 ^INTRODUCTION 
> /usr/share/doc/cups-common/copyright 
> INTRODUCTION
> 
> The Common UNIX Printing System(tm), ("CUPS(tm)"), is provided
> under the GNU General Public License ("GPL") and GNU Library
> General Public License ("LGPL"), Version 2, with exceptions for
> Apple operating systems and the OpenSSL toolkit. A copy of the
> exceptions and licenses follow this introduction.

Following the guidance at http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing/FAQ I 
would say that since the code is explicit about being licensed per the 
terms in LICENSE.txt, "GPLv2 only" is a reasonable interpretation.

If anybody thinks this is important to clarify I can chase it with the 
Fedora licensing guys.

Regards, Joe