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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