[Fedora-legal-list] Re: Need help with x2godrive licensing.
On Thu, Sep 28, 2023 at 9:45 PM Orion Poplawski <orion(a)nwra.com> wrote:
I'm trying to package x2gokdrive for Fedora (review [1]), but running
into some questions/issues with the licensing:
1 - There is no license file in the released tarball
2 - The debian/copyright file in the git repo [2] states that the
license is GPL-2+ except for testscripts/* at GPL-2. However,
licensecheck reports:
./x2gokdrive.c: Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer - sell variant
./x2gokdrive.h: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdrivecursor.c: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdriveinit.c: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdrivelog.h: Historical Permission Notice and Disclaimer - sell
variant
./x2gokdriveremote.c: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdriveremote.h: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdriveselection.c: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
./x2gokdriveselection.h: GNU General Public License v3.0 or later
3 - This code is combined with the Xorg server code which is under the
MIT license.
This is quite a mess. I've asked upstream here [3] for some
clarification, but I was hoping that the Fedora folks could speak to
some of this, particularly item #3.
The licensecheck results look accurate as far as detection of license
notices goes. If I had to guess, the included debian/copyright file is
based on an older version where the x2gokdrive* files used
GPLv2-or-later and the project never bothered to update it when they
updated the license to GPLv3-or-later (so too with the bundled spec
file). For whatever reason, the testscripts indicate GPLv2-only.
I would probably assume for simplicity that the Xorg patches are under
whatever version(s) of the GPL apply to the project generally, except
that's not clear here. But in general your best bet is to try to get
the project to explain what's going on, and maybe also persuade them
to add one or more license files.
Richard