Potential license incompatibility: MIT license vs. upstream Pandoc's GPL license Issue

[shenlu89]

Hello Tweag team,

First of all, thank you for this very useful project! It's fantastic to have a version of Pandoc that can run in a Wasm environment.

I am opening this issue to raise a potential question regarding the project's license. I noticed that pandoc-wasm is licensed under the MIT License.

However, pandoc-wasm is a derivative work of Pandoc, which is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). The GPL is a "copyleft" license, which generally requires that derivative works also be licensed under the GPL.

Since pandoc-wasm compiles and wraps the Pandoc CLI, it appears to fall under the definition of a derivative work. According to the terms of the GPL, this requires pandoc-wasm also to be distributed under the GPL, rather than the more permissive MIT license. The current MIT license could potentially lead to uses that are not compliant with the original licensing of Pandoc.

Could you please clarify the reasoning behind choosing the MIT license? I may be misunderstanding some aspect of how the projects are linked. This clarification would be beneficial for me and other users who need to be mindful of license compliance in our own projects.

Thank you for your time and for the excellent work you've done on this project.

[alerque]

The GPL is a "viral"' license without even exceptions for linked libraries. Pandoc compiled to WASM does need to follow the terms of the original license.