[Fedora-legal-list] Proper license field for GPL aggregation

[Michel Alexandre Salim]

On 03/14/2011 05:15 AM, Tom Callaway wrote:
> On 03/12/2011 11:42 AM, Michel Alexandre Salim wrote:
>> If a package's source is under a GPL-compatible license (say MIT), and 
>> it links against a GPL library (say readline's GPLv3+), what should the 
>> license field say? Maybe "MIT and GPLv3", with a comment explaining 
>> which library pulls in the GPLv3 requirement?
> 
> We don't try to calculate licensing across linkage in a package. Just
> use the license of the code that goes directly into the binaries within
> your package. So, in your example, it would be just "MIT".
> 
Thanks, Tom. Will revert the change at the next update. In this specific
case, it does not really matter, but in cases where the package in
question can be further linked with other programs, won't it be a bit
misleading if the license is just, say, "MIT"?

I had such a problem recently; the pure package has an interpreter is
linkable against either readline or libedit, but is under LGPL -- I
switched it to libedit rather than have to worry about licensing issues.
Come to think about it, as long as only the interpreter is linked
against readline, and the shared library is not, there won't be a
problem with GPL terms being propagated to binaries generated from
sources written in pure...

Thanks,

-- 
Michel Alexandre Salim

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