[gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

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There is a template library called Eigen I would like to add to the tree. It 
is a dependency of an application I would like to add shortly. It will also 
end up being a dependency of KDE 4 (for kalzium). My question relates to the 
licence the code is released under.

It is licenced under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later with the following 
exception,

// As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros
// or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it
// with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not
// by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public
// License. This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work
// based on this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.

Please see http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ for more details. My question is 
whether this requires a new licence to be added to the tree, listing it under 
GPL-2 and then installing a copy of the modified licence or something I have 
not thought of?

Thanks,

Marcus

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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No. LICENSE="GPL-2 some-exception" suffices. That said, we suck at our 
licensing information badly. E.g. every single ebuild linking against OpenSSL 
has (or at least needs to have) a linking exeption. We don't flag this 
anywhere. More important, what's with optional dependencies!? We don't 
support 

LICENSE="GPL-2 ssl? ( openssl-exception)"

style LICENSE content at all iirc. Similar for all the patent-encumbered 
multimedia libs, which can't be distributed as binaries, but are not blocked 
by some bindist feature flag or so.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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Err, every single _GPL_licensed_ software needs an OpenSSL exception of 
course.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Bryan Østergaard]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 02:27:43PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> No. LICENSE="GPL-2 some-exception" suffices. That said, we suck at our 
> licensing information badly. E.g. every single ebuild linking against OpenSSL 
> has (or at least needs to have) a linking exeption. We don't flag this 
> anywhere. More important, what's with optional dependencies!? We don't 
> support 
> 
> LICENSE="GPL-2 ssl? ( openssl-exception)"
> 
> style LICENSE content at all iirc. Similar for all the patent-encumbered 
> multimedia libs, which can't be distributed as binaries, but are not blocked 
> by some bindist feature flag or so.
> 
License follows the same syntax as DEPEND. See
http://devmanual.gentoo.org/ebuild-writing/variables/index.html#license.

Regards,
Bryan Østergaard
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Petteri Räty]

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Marcus D. Hanwell kirjoitti:
> There is a template library called Eigen I would like to add to the tree. It 
> is a dependency of an application I would like to add shortly. It will also 
> end up being a dependency of KDE 4 (for kalzium). My question relates to the 
> licence the code is released under.
> 
> It is licenced under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later with the following 
> exception,
> 
> // As a special exception, if other files instantiate templates or use macros
> // or inline functions from this file, or you compile this file and link it
> // with other works to produce a work based on this file, this file does not
> // by itself cause the resulting work to be covered by the GNU General Public
> // License. This exception does not invalidate any other reasons why a work
> // based on this file might be covered by the GNU General Public License.
> 
> Please see http://eigen.tuxfamily.org/ for more details. My question is 
> whether this requires a new licence to be added to the tree, listing it under 
> GPL-2 and then installing a copy of the modified licence or something I have 
> not thought of?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Marcus

dev-java/gnu-classpath has a similar exception and we have it in as
GPL-2-with-linking-exception so whatever we end up with it should be
done the same way for all ebuilds. As by default the licenses are anded
I guess we should go with "GPL-2 exception" as Carsten suggested.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Harald van Dijk]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 02:27:20PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> No. LICENSE="GPL-2 some-exception" suffices.

No, that means something completely different. It means that you should
install the software only if you find both the GPL-2 and the exception
acceptable, rather than if you find the combination of the GPL-2 with
the exception acceptable.

A new license should be added. See the GMGPL and
GPL-2-with-linking-exception licenses for an example (especially GMGPL).
-- 
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Mike Frysinger]

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On Saturday 12 May 2007, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> More important, what's with optional dependencies!? We don't support
>
> LICENSE="GPL-2 ssl? ( openssl-exception)"

yes we do
-mike

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Samstag, 12. Mai 2007, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 02:27:20PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> > No. LICENSE="GPL-2 some-exception" suffices.
>
> No, that means something completely different. It means that you should
> install the software only if you find both the GPL-2 and the exception
> acceptable, rather than if you find the combination of the GPL-2 with
> the exception acceptable.

And that's why it's not different. Such exceptions usually don't stand for 
themselves, but relate to the license they're bound to. Can be matter of the 
wording, though. 

I consider it quite stupid adding extra licenses for such exceptions.


Carsten

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Harald van Dijk]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 03:13:02PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Samstag, 12. Mai 2007, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 02:27:20PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> > > No. LICENSE="GPL-2 some-exception" suffices.
> >
> > No, that means something completely different. It means that you should
> > install the software only if you find both the GPL-2 and the exception
> > acceptable, rather than if you find the combination of the GPL-2 with
> > the exception acceptable.
> 
> And that's why it's not different. Such exceptions usually don't stand for 
> themselves, but relate to the license they're bound to. Can be matter of the 
> wording, though. 

Do you need to accept the unmodified GPL-2 for software licensed under
the GPL-2 plus exception? No? Then GPL-2 does not belong in LICENSE,
unless in a || group.

> I consider it quite stupid adding extra licenses for such exceptions.

A generic license could be used, which points to the packages for the
exact license.
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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Carsten Lohrke]

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On Samstag, 12. Mai 2007, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> Do you need to accept the unmodified GPL-2 for software licensed under
> the GPL-2 plus exception? No? Then GPL-2 does not belong in LICENSE,
> unless in a || group.

Of course you accept the GPL plus the added exception. Just because an 
exception exists, it does not become a completely different license.


Carsten 

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

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On Saturday 12 May 2007 15:22:15 Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Samstag, 12. Mai 2007, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > Do you need to accept the unmodified GPL-2 for software licensed under
> > the GPL-2 plus exception? No? Then GPL-2 does not belong in LICENSE,
> > unless in a || group.
>
> Of course you accept the GPL plus the added exception. Just because an
> exception exists, it does not become a completely different license.
>
This is a big part of the reason I was unsure. In this case it is the GPL 
licence with the exception to extend your ability to include it in other 
work. Talking to the author he has done this because the library is a pure 
template library and so linking exception makes no sense - there is nothing 
to link to.

I suspected that GPL-2 would probably be fine. This is far from an isolated 
case. Benoit (the author of Eigen) and Diego have pointed out to me that 
libstdc++ contains similarly licenced template code for the same reasons - 
the LGPL and the GPL with linking exception are meaningless in this case.

Personally I would just like to get Eigen included, but didn't want to 
unnecessarily clutter our licences directory further. If anything it would be 
nice to come up with a more generic solution than adding this particular 
license with exception. The exception serves to make this license more 
permissive - i.e. it can be compiled into other code much as LGPL allows 
libraries to be linked to.

I guess I could add it and we could fix the licence later if there is no clear 
consensus (or policy already in place).

Thanks,

Marcus

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Harald van Dijk]

On Sat, May 12, 2007 at 04:21:52PM +0200, Carsten Lohrke wrote:
> On Samstag, 12. Mai 2007, Harald van Dijk wrote:
> > Do you need to accept the unmodified GPL-2 for software licensed under
> > the GPL-2 plus exception? No? Then GPL-2 does not belong in LICENSE,
> > unless in a || group.
> 
> Of course you accept the GPL plus the added exception. Just because an 
> exception exists, it does not become a completely different license.

Of course you accept the GPL plus the added exception, *if* you accept
the GPL. If you don't accept the GPL, however, you can still
legitimately accept the GPL with the exception.
-- 
gentoo-dev@gentoo.org mailing list

Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Kevin F. Quinn]

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On Sat, 12 May 2007 12:41:58 +0100
"Marcus D. Hanwell" <cryos@gentoo.org> wrote:

> There is a template library called Eigen I would like to add to the
> tree. It is a dependency of an application I would like to add
> shortly. It will also end up being a dependency of KDE 4 (for
> kalzium). My question relates to the licence the code is released
> under.
> 
> It is licenced under the GNU GPL, version 2 or later with the
> following exception,

This is a common situation with GPL compilers - some are licensed
so that they can be used to build non-GPL software, some can only be
used to build GPL software.

The situation with Eigen is similar to the "libgcc exception" for GCC.
We don't mention that in the LICENSE for gcc.  This is the exception
that allows you to build non-GPL software with gcc (note for the
interested - if you build profiled executables with gcc, the GPL applies
to the built executable since the profile support code linked into the
executable is licensed purely under the GPL - not a real problem as
no-one distributes profiled executables!).

However there's also a similar exception for gnat-gcc; that has a
separate license file GMGPL which explains the situation there.
However this is talking about extra libgcc stuff that is
Ada-specific - the standard libgcc exception is not mentioned.
For information, gnat-gpl (the AdaCore-sponsored version) doesn't have
the exception, so is straight GPL - this also means you can't use
gnat-gpl to build and distribute BSD-licensed software, for example.

So currently we're inconsistent.  We must be accurate in our license
declarations, I think, so my view is if Eigen has a license that is GPL
with some exception, that should be made clear.

All these exceptions are doing the same thing - relaxing the GPL as it
applies to the compiler (or template library in this case), so that it
does not apply to works created using it.  I like the
"GPL-2-with-linking-exception" license name that the gnu-classpath
package uses; perhaps we could include (concatenate) all the exception
clauses that lead to the same thing into that license file and have the
relevant packages use that license name.

-- 
Kevin F. Quinn

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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Petteri Räty]

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Kevin F. Quinn kirjoitti:
> 
> All these exceptions are doing the same thing - relaxing the GPL as it
> applies to the compiler (or template library in this case), so that it
> does not apply to works created using it.  I like the
> "GPL-2-with-linking-exception" license name that the gnu-classpath
> package uses; perhaps we could include (concatenate) all the exception
> clauses that lead to the same thing into that license file and have the
> relevant packages use that license name.
> 

This seems like a prudent course of action.

Regards,
Petteri


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Re: [gentoo-dev] Eigen and GPL-2 exception - is a new licence required?

[Marcus D. Hanwell]

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On Saturday 12 May 2007 20:40:29 Petteri Räty wrote:
> Kevin F. Quinn kirjoitti:
> > All these exceptions are doing the same thing - relaxing the GPL as it
> > applies to the compiler (or template library in this case), so that it
> > does not apply to works created using it.  I like the
> > "GPL-2-with-linking-exception" license name that the gnu-classpath
> > package uses; perhaps we could include (concatenate) all the exception
> > clauses that lead to the same thing into that license file and have the
> > relevant packages use that license name.
>
> This seems like a prudent course of action.
>
So something like GPL-2-with-exceptions, and then include the exception of 
Eigen initially. Then as others add stuff add their exceptions there and 
point to the licence in docs which would contain a copy of the GPL-2 with its 
exception as provided by that project?

The Eigen licence is pretty much -with-linking-exception except it is a 
template library and so it is built into the code rather than linked to. 
Hence the need for different wording as is also the case with some of the STL 
stuff.

If people are happy with this solution it seems reasonable to me too. I will 
add Eigen and this licence this evening if I don't hear any big objections to 
it. Otherwise we could end up with 50 GPL-2-with-*-exception...

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