On Tue, 30 Oct 2012 19:31:22 +0100 Laszlo Kajan wrote: [...] > Dear Team members! Hello Laszlo, I am a debian-legal regular and what follows is my own personal opinion on the issue (from the licensing point of view). The usual disclaimers apply (IANAL, TINLA, ...). > > PSICOV [1], a protein contact prediction tool, is built with a patched version of the GPL-2 Fortran source glasso [2]: > > gfortran -O3 psicov.c glasso_psicov.f90 -lm -lgsl -lgslcblas -o psicov This seems to create an executable binary of PSICOV, statically linked with the modified version of glasso, and dynamically linked with the GNU Scientific Library. > > The license of PSICOV does not seem free to me [3], with restrictions on commercial use [...] The license of PSICOV indeed seems to include a number of definitely non-free restrictions and really appears to be GPL-v2-incompatible and GPL-v3-incompatible. At the same time, glasso seems to be released under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 (only v2, I would say, since I didn't spot any "or later version" permission in the somewhat unclear glasso_1.7.tar.gz source archive). The GNU GSL is released under the terms of the GNU GPL v3 or later (http://packages.debian.org/changelogs/pool/main/g/gsl/current/copyright). This makes for a very odd mutually-incompatible license mix: the GNU GPL v3 is incompatible with the GNU GPL v2, and the PSICOV license is incompatible with both. > > If I understand GPL well, this simply is not allowed: PSICOV is not allowed to restrict what is granted by glasso's license (and that does not > limit any of the above). The question is: > > * Do I see it correctly that PSICOV's license violates the GPL-2 terms of glasso? I think that the PSICOV binary (built as described above) is legally undistributable: its distribution appears to violate the copyright of glasso and of the GNU Scientific Library. The possible solutions I can think of are (in order of descending desirability): (A) contact the PSICOV copyright holder(s) and persuade them to re-license PSICOV under GPL-compatible terms (for instance under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 or later); at the same time contact the GNU Scientific Library copyright holder(s) and persuade them to re-license GSL under the terms of the GNU GPL *v2* or later (rather than GPL v3 or later) (B) contact the PSICOV copyright holder(s) and persuade them to re-license PSICOV under GPL-compatible terms (for instance under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 or later); at the same time contact the glasso copyright holder(s) and persuade them to re-license glasso under the terms of the GNU GPL v2 *or later* (rather than GPL v2 only) (C) refrain completely from distributing PSICOV Please note that solution (A) is unlikely, since the GNU Scientific Library, as part of the GNU Project, is supposed to promote the GNU GPL v3 (due to the FSF propaganda). Maybe solution (B) has more chances to be achievable... I hope that my own personal take on this matter helps a bit. Bye and good luck. -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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