Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

LGPL 2.1 license incompatibility with Apache #2

Open
eddies opened this issue Dec 18, 2019 · 0 comments
Open

LGPL 2.1 license incompatibility with Apache #2

eddies opened this issue Dec 18, 2019 · 0 comments

Comments

@eddies
Copy link
Contributor

eddies commented Dec 18, 2019

Is your feature request related to a problem? Please describe.
discreetly has a handful of direct, runtime dependencies:

Library License
click BSD 3-Clause
boto3 Apache 2.0
google-cloud-kms Apache 2.0
google-cloud-datastore Apache 2.0

as well as a number of development-only dependencies

Library License
tox MIT
pytest MIT
moto Apache 2.0

Evidently, the LGPL 2.1 license that was chosen for discreetly is incompatible with (at least) the Apache 2.0 license:

this license is not compatible with GPL version 2, because it has some requirements that are not in that GPL version. These include certain patent termination and indemnification provisions.

However, the GPL version 3 (and thereby the LGPLv3) is compatible with Apache 2.0 (at least in one direction). Per the ASF:

Apache 2 software can therefore be included in GPLv3 projects, because the GPLv3 license accepts our software into GPLv3 works. However, GPLv3 software cannot be included in Apache projects. The licenses are incompatible in one direction only, and it is a result of ASF's licensing philosophy and the GPLv3 authors' interpretation of copyright law.

This licensing incompatibility applies only when some Apache project software becomes a derivative work of some GPLv3 software, because then the Apache software would have to be distributed under GPLv3. This would be incompatible with ASF's requirement that all Apache software must be distributed under the Apache License 2.0.

There's an old, long discussion about the ASF's policy decision to disallow LGPL'ed (v2 or 3) software in their own projects--emphasis on policy rather than legal decision.

Describe the solution you'd like
At the least, discreetly should be relicensed under LGPLv3.
Possibly, consider relicensing under another license entirely, e.g. Apache 2.0

Additional context

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
None yet
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

1 participant