[gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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Trying to cleanup the faad/faac situation, I ended up thinking about a little 
situation with Amarok.

Right now the aac useflag enable support for MP4v2 tags writing through 
libmp4v2; the problem is that the library is licensed under MPL, while Amarok 
is licensed under GPL, and they are likely not compatible one to the other, 
which means it's impossible to redistribute binaries built this way.

I wonder if with ACCEPT_LICENSES it would be possible to get a way to 
represent this issue, like a "unredistributable" fake license, disabled 
during GRP building for instance, so that the packages needing that license 
wouldn't be built in binary form and redistributed by us.

Any proposal on this issue?

Besides, we should really start caring about the GPL-2 or GPL-2+ license.. but 
that's going to be another mail.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Sound, ALSA, PAM, KDE, CJK, Ruby ...

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@gentoo.org> schrieb:

Hi,

> Right now the aac useflag enable support for MP4v2 tags writing through 
> libmp4v2; the problem is that the library is licensed under MPL, while Amarok 
> is licensed under GPL, and they are likely not compatible one to the other, 
> which means it's impossible to redistribute binaries built this way.

I'm not an license expert, but *IMHO* this only is an issue on static
linking, not w/ dynamic linking. My argumentation would go like this:

* The only possible conflict is that MPL'ed binaries are not allowed 
  to link into GPL'ed ones. 
* What we call dynamic linking is actually loading some binary into 
  an process and using its code/data - files are not touched
* We do not actually link against an certain library, but instead
  against some *interface* (ie. defined by some .h file) - this
  is independent from an specific binary.
* On an binary distribution, the two packages only sit somewhere in
  our filesystem (as well as an installed system) and aren't linked
  together in any way. 
  
=> There's no impact on an binary distro (which would not be on 
   the running system). 
   
To prohibit such an binary distro you could try two ways:

a) prohibit MPL'ed and GPL'ed files together on the same media 
   or computer. Totally stupid idea, IMHO.
b) claim exclusive rights on an interface specification.  
   -> not copyright, but patent issue
   -> at least in EU, such patents are illegal (although they exists)


Just my 0.02 EUR ...

cu
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò]

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On Saturday 23 December 2006 22:35, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> I'm not an license expert
Then shut up.

You're wrong, it's true for dynamic linking as well as for static linking.

-- 
Diego "Flameeyes" Pettenò - http://farragut.flameeyes.is-a-geek.org/
Gentoo/Alt lead, Gentoo/FreeBSD, Video, Sound, ALSA, PAM, KDE, CJK, Ruby ...

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Saturday 23 December 2006 17:34, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> On Saturday 23 December 2006 22:35, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > I'm not an license expert
>
> Then shut up.
>
> You're wrong, it's true for dynamic linking as well as for static linking.

agreed on both points
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Vlastimil Babka]

Stephen Bennett wrote:
> Obviously though that doesn't work in the more general case where said
> linkage is not based on an optional dep, so something better would be
> useful. I'm not sure LICENSE is the right way forward here -- it would
>   
How bout using RESTRICT? RESTRIC="bindist" or something, for the 
unconditional violations?

Vlastimil Babka
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Stephen Bennett]

On Fri, 22 Dec 2006 21:22:54 +0100
"Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò" <flameeyes@gentoo.org> wrote:

> I wonder if with ACCEPT_LICENSES it would be possible to get a way to 
> represent this issue, like a "unredistributable" fake license,
> disabled during GRP building for instance, so that the packages
> needing that license wouldn't be built in binary form and
> redistributed by us.
> 
> Any proposal on this issue?

Well, we have a bindist USE flags for more or less this purpose -- it's
hardly an optimal solution, but in this case from the sound of things
the problematic linking could be disabled when building a binary
distribution.

Obviously though that doesn't work in the more general case where said
linkage is not based on an optional dep, so something better would be
useful. I'm not sure LICENSE is the right way forward here -- it would
work with the currently proposed syntax, but seems somehow an abuse of
the system. On the other hand, though, I don't have a better option to
hand at the moment, and it is a licensing issue after all...

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Stephen Bennett]

On Sun, 24 Dec 2006 18:51:24 +0100
Vlastimil Babka <caster@gentoo.org> wrote:

> How bout using RESTRICT? RESTRIC="bindist" or something, for the 
> unconditional violations?

RESTRICT does not at present affect visibility of packages. I'd like to
keep it that way.
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[gentoo-dev] License issues [WAS: Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?]

[Enrico Weigelt]

* Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò <flameeyes@gentoo.org> schrieb:
> On Saturday 23 December 2006 22:35, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> > I'm not an license expert
> Then shut up.
> 
> You're wrong, it's true for dynamic linking as well as for 
> static linking.

I don't understand that. Please give some help. 

The situation: 

* Some package A is importing an library with some interface I
* Some other package B provides an library with some interface I

The author of B can decide who may import an certain interface,
just because he wrote an lib providing this interface ?

Where does his legitimation come from ?
Copyright ? -> where's his code here ?
Patents ? -> are they legal ?

If this would be true, then evryone who's writing some proprietary
library can prohibit writing drop-in-replacements. So I wonder why
so many of them exist, obviously legal. 

Where's my mistake ?


cu
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---------------------------------------------------------------------
 Enrico Weigelt    ==   metux IT service - http://www.metux.de/
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Re: [gentoo-dev] License issues [WAS: Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?]

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Sunday 24 December 2006 19:17, Enrico Weigelt wrote:
> I don't understand that.

go do some reading from the fsf then

we dont want this crap on the mailing list
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Marking GPL-incompatible linkage?

[Chris Gianelloni]

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On Fri, 2006-12-22 at 21:22 +0100, Diego 'Flameeyes' Pettenò wrote:
> I wonder if with ACCEPT_LICENSES it would be possible to get a way to 
> represent this issue, like a "unredistributable" fake license, disabled 
> during GRP building for instance, so that the packages needing that license 
> wouldn't be built in binary form and redistributed by us.

Nope.

> Any proposal on this issue?

USE=bindist

If that is set, then we don't link to libmp4v2, no matter what else USE
says.  This is how we generally get around issues such as this.  It
isn't necessarily optimal, but it is the current best solution that we
have and it'll match up with our other packages.

-- 
Chris Gianelloni
Release Engineering Strategic Lead
Alpha/AMD64/x86 Architecture Teams
Games Developer/Council Member/Foundation Trustee
Gentoo Foundation

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