Bug#903289: dh-make-elpa license and contribution

[Lev Lamberov <dogsleg@debian.org>]

Пт 24 авг 2018 @ 17:15 Sean Whitton <spwhitton@spwhitton.name>:

>> The point I'd like to focus attention to is licensing of dh-make-elpa.
>> Currently, it is licensed under GPL-3+. It is based (and I'd say
>> heavily based) on dh-make-perl, which is licensed under GPL-2-only.
>> I've asked Sean Whitton about it on IRC and got the following answer:
>>
>> 23:45 < spwhitton> dogsleg: we don't actually derive code from dh-make-perl -- dh-make-perl's code is included as a library.  so I think the licensing is okay.
>> 23:45 < spwhitton> dogsleg: there are very small number of lines that are actually copied directly; probably less than copyrightable.
>
> Please ask participants' permission before quoting from IRC channels
> into permanently-recorded formats like the Debian BTS (in this case, I
> would have given permission).

Oops, sorry for that! I should be more discreet.

>> Second, classes from DhMakePerl are in fact used in DhMakeELPA (as
>> base classes):
>>
>> $ rgrep DhMakePerl
>> lib/DhMakeELPA/Config.pm:use base 'DhMakePerl::Config';
>> lib/DhMakeELPA/Command/Packaging.pm:use base 'DhMakePerl::Command::Packaging';
>
> According to the FSF,[1] the GPLv3 is not compatible with the GPLv2.  So
> it looks like I am not allowed to derive classes from DhMakePerl and
> license the new classes as GPL-3+.
>
> I've updated d/copyright to license dh-make-elpa under GPL-2 only, since
> that's all that is permitted.

Thank you, Sean! It makes everything much easier!

Regards,
Lev