On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 09:32:04PM +0800, LI Daobing (李道兵) wrote:
> Dear mentors,
>
> I got a question from the upstream, the source tarball contains GPL
> and LGPL code, and this source tarball can generate several packages.
> can I release one package in GPL and another in LGPL?
Yes, because the tarball is just an aggregation of the parts, so there
is no problem if some of them are GPL and others are not.
Even if the rest would need to be GPL for that, it wouldn't be a
problem. The LGPL states that it is allowed to relicense the code under
the GPL instead. So for practical purposes, LGPL licensed works are
always dual licensed LGPL/GPL[1].
If there are binary packages which build solely from LGPL sources (they
do not use any GPL-only sources), those packages can be licensed as
LGPL.
> Is it possible to create several debian binary packages from signal
> tarball, and mark different debian package with different license? In
> fedora, I created several binary rpms from scim-python tarball with
> different license. pinyin-table.txt is needed by xingma engine, you
> could put it in xingma package and mark it GPL.
This is also possible in Debian.
> Other parts should be LGPL.
It is always allowed to just license LGPL'd packages as GPL, so "should"
is a bit strong here. However, it is the best thing to do, I think; it
gives our users all the options (GPL or LGPL).
Thanks,
Bas
[1] Watch out for versions though: LGPL 3 may be turned into GPL 3,
which is not compatible with GPL 2. So if you have one part which
is GPL 2 only, and another which is LGPL 3 or later, they cannot be
combined. I do not know if this is relevant here.
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