Seeking advice on Pan license issue with optional TLS component
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
--
https://github.com/dod38fr/ -o- http://search.cpan.org/~ddumont/
http://ddumont.wordpress.com/ -o- irc: dod at irc.debian.org
Reply to: