11–20 of 224 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No. That is the case of Linus Torvalds not using the standard "or later" clause. He has his (bad) reasons. The incompatibility is caused by "lack of restrictions" clause. Without that, GPL becomes essentially BSD with all the corporate thievery that entails.
What is a good source to get an understanding of all the Licenses and their relation?
> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
I am curious about how that compares with libbfd since that wasn't under consideration for us as it uses GPLv3.
> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
Unless perf has the standard clause allowing use of later versions of GPL. That would make it GPLv3 if linked against libbfd. Unfortunately it does not.
Yet another case of GPL virality causing more issues than it solves. E: Downvoters, have you read the article? The program started a new process for each address lookup instead of using a library because that library is GPL. Shall we have a discussion?
It seems odd that the takeaway is "GPL sucks because it got in my way" and not "both authors' explicit wishes were respected." Assuming that this is in error and this isn't what the authors wanted to happen then it's fixable by someone changing their license.
Yet another case of GPL virality causing more issues than it solves. E: Downvoters, have you read the article? The program started a new process for each address lookup instead of using a library because that library is GPL. Shall we have a discussion?
No. That is the case of Linus Torvalds not using the standard "or later" clause. He has his (bad) reasons. The incompatibility is caused by "lack of restrictions" clause. Without that, GPL becomes essentially BSD with all the corporate thievery that entails.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems odd that the takeaway is "GPL sucks because it got in my way" and not "both authors' explicit wishes were respected." Assuming that this is in error and this isn't what the authors wanted to happen then it's fixable by someone changing their license.
It's fixable with a license change, but in practice that's impossible for large projects. Without a CLA, every individual who's contributed is a copyright owner. If you can't get every single one of them to agree to change it, then the license is stuck. And it doesn't matter if the reason you can't get them to agree is because they've become uncontactable or died.
What are they gonna do? Sue you from beyond the grave?
> Michał Sidor suggests building against libbfd, something that the Debian maintainers don’t want to do. "don't want to" isn't quite correct - they can't . Perf is licensed under the GPLv2, libbfd under the GPLv3. The licenses are incompatible, which makes the combination unredistributable - which is what Debian would be doing with it. Debian is legally not allowed to do this.
Is there not an exception in the license for "system libraries" which libbfd kind of is?
That makes it arguably not a system library, so it's fair that Debian would want to steer clear of that interpretation.