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Re: GPL for package under MIT license upstream; repack?



Plain no. If they are really interested they would know that they can use every MIT part under GPL because of license compatibilty. Things change dramatically if you would consider to change the licenses of the files - if one would contribute to your now forked files the original project would have hard times to use your (hopefully useful) changes because they could not port back (license incompatibility)


So - it is up to you.


Cheers Alf


On 24.09.19 21:30, Gard Spreemann wrote:
Colin Watson <cjwatson@debian.org> writes:

On Tue, Sep 24, 2019 at 10:41:07AM +0200, Gard Spreemann wrote:
A package I maintain (src:gudhi) was mostly under GPL-3+ up to and
including the current version in the archives. Since then, upstream has
switched to an MIT license, but with the caveat that many parts of the
code has GPL dependencies and that "for practical purposes this code is
GPL-3 for the user" [1].

Instead of having to carefully figure out precisely which parts of the
code should be considered GPL for the Debian package, I'm tempted to
consider the whole codebase GPL for this purpose.

Does this sound sane? Are there some particular steps I should follow?
Should I create a Debian repack of the source where every file's
copyright header reflects the above, or do I only need to do this for
(header) files included in the binary packages? Or does it suffice for
d/copyright to reflect it?
I don't think you need to (or even should) change the licence notices on
individual files.
But if I don't even change this in the header files (installed with
libgudhi-dev), isn't there a significant risk that I will mislead Debian
users into thinking that they may use every part of the GUDHI library
under the MIT?

 Best,
 Gard


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