Potential python-docutils license change

Toshio Kuratomi a.badger at gmail.com
Thu May 19 16:44:08 UTC 2011


To get python-docutils building with python-3.2 I've upgraded the F15 and
Rawhide versions to a snapshot of 0.8.  Unfortunately, this version brings
in new code that's licensed under the Apache license.  This would change the
license from "Public Domain and MIT and Python and GPLv2" to "Public Domain
and MIT and Python and Apache and GPLv3+".

The ramification that I can see from this would be that code that makes use
of python-docutils (note, not invoking its functionality via the commandline
tools it ships, just using it as a library) potentially won't be able to use
the GPLv2 as a legal license anymore.  Converting to GPLv3 (or GPLv3+) would
be okay.

I've opened a bug upstream to see if upstream would be willing to change the
license on this subset of code so that we can continue to use it under the
old license terms:

https://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=3304675&group_id=38414&atid=422030

repoquery shows me the following:

repoquery -q --whatrequires python-docutils
python-docutils-0:0.7-3.fc14.noarch
ikiwiki-0:3.20110430-1.fc14.noarch
python-sphinx-0:1.0.7-1.fc14.noarch
rst2pdf-0:0.16-1.fc14.noarch
supybot-meetbot-0:0.1.4-5.fc14.noarch
synopsis-0:0.12-4.fc14.x86_64

python-sphinx brings in spyder and supybot-meetbot brings in supybot.

There's more packages out there that rely on docutils as an optional dep (I
know of at least trac and moin) likely when they have the optional ability
to use restructured text.

I'm not sure whether this change would propagate through code that relies on
docutils (so that, for instance, no supybot plugin could be GPLv2 or no trac
plugin could be GPLv2) but that seems likely.

I'll keep an eye on the bug and ping the author of the code directly to try
and resolve this without relicensing but I felt this was problematic enough
that I should warn people now of the potential impact to their packages.

-Toshio
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