[Pan-devel] Seeking advice on Pan license issue with optional TLS component

[Dominique Dumont]

Hello

Here's a summary of the issue for debian-legal folks. Pan package on Debian 
got bug #699892 because Pan GPLv2 only is linked with gnutls LGPLv3, which is 
not permitted by FSF. Pan folks are willing to re-license Pan to GPLv2 and 
later. But getting copyright owner authorisation for all software components 
copied into Pan is a big problem: there's no obvious contact for some of these 
components.

Reading http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#MereAggregation, I think we 
may not need to re-license all components of pan code. 

Pan is made of several part. Some parts like uulib or e-*-dialog.c are 
integrated in Pan by source code copy. Other parts like gnutls are integrated 
with dynamic linking (optionaly).

To respect the license terms, I think we need to check the compatibility 
between parts when the parts are actually working together (i.e. some data is 
exchanged directly between these 2 components).

I.e. we need to check that:
- Pan license is compatible with gnutls license
- Pan license is compatible with e-*-dialog.c (and others)

but we don't need to ensure that e-*dialog.c license is compatible with gnutls 
license because these 2 parts work independently (well, I think so, you Pan 
guys should be able to confirm easily).

If I'm right, Pan maintainers only need to re-license Pan parts. 

Since this is the first time I'm dealing with a trciky licensing issue, I'd 
like some folks from debian-legal mailing list to confirm my opinion.

The bugs tracking this issue are 
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=699892
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=693272

All the best



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