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Re: ELPA license, LGPL + additional restrictions



On Fri, 2 Nov 2012 17:23:43 +0100 Michael Banck wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> thanks for your answer.

You're welcome!

> 
> On Fri, Nov 02, 2012 at 04:49:08PM +0100, Francesco Poli wrote:
[...]
> > My own personal opinion is that such additional restriction (which I am
> > not even sure can actually be added this way to the GNU LGPL v3) makes
> > the result GPL-incompatible.
> > The reason is that the GNU GPL insists that the whole work be available
> > under the terms of the GNU GPL, but the above restriction makes this
> > impossible for the ELPA library.
> 
> Now that you mention it I guess that clause was explicitly included in
> the LGPLv3 in order to maintain GPL-compatibility by design, right?

It is my understanding that this is indeed the case.

> 
> In that case, I will bring it up with the CP2K maintainers.  They do not
> distribute binaries though, only a source repository and sometimes
> release tarballs.  Is this already an issue as they are shipping the
> ELPA source in their tree right now?

I am not sure that the issue bites even for source-only distribution...

Maybe it depends on how the distribution is performed.
The relevant questions could perhaps be something like: are CP2K and
ELPA distributed as a single whole work? or do CP2K maintainers just
distribute ELPA source as a separate library for their users'
convenience?

Anyway, I'll leave this for other debian-legal regulars to reply.
Sure there are people way more knowledgeable than me on this specific
matter.

[...]

Bye and thanks for taking this issue seriously.


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