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Re: Re: [License-review] Chroma license / United States Government Contract



[Resending this, as my last mail seems not to have made it to the list.]

Hi Ben,

thanks for your review of the license.

As I found it unsatisfactory, that chroma is distributed under a non-free license, I took a closer look at the source code searching for other licenses.

Chroma (build-)depends on quite a lot of other programs, most notably QDP++, that is distributed with the same COPYING file as chroma. But both chroma and QDP++ depend on third party libraries (in the other_libs folder of the source tree, that can be downloaded with 'git submodule update --init --recursive'). In chroma/other_libs/ one finds qdp-lapack that ships as COPYING just the GPL Version 2, June 1991. In qdp++/other_libs are filedb, libintrin, qio and xpath_reader and all of these have the GPL v2 in their COPYING files.

Correct me if I am wrong, but I think that if one uses the source of a GPL licensed program to build another program, this has to be distributed under the GPL as well. (Section 2. b) of the GPL)

If that is true, is it allowed to simply use the chroma source, as if the COPYING contained the GPL v2, or is it necessary to contact the author of chroma and request a change of the COPYING file?

Best regards,
Andreas


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