Bug#617613: "FreeCAD not in Testing"

[Francesco Poli]

On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:06:54 +0100 Anton Gladky wrote:

> Hello,

Hi Anton, thanks for following up on this issue.

> 
> does it mean, that FreeCAD upstream and others (gmsh, for example) has
> chosen the wrong license?

No, I don't think that this is the conclusion we should draw from the
issue under consideration.

FreeCAD copyright owners chose the GNU LGPL (v2 or later), which is a
good choice (and does not prevent, by itself, the distribution of
FreeCAD linked with OpenCASCADE).
There are some files licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL (v2 or
later) included in FreeCAD, and those files may be an issue with
respect to OpenCASCADE.

But anyway, that's not the point: even in the hypothetical case where
the whole FreeCAD were licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, their
copyright owners could always add an exception to allow the
distribution of copies linked with works licensed under the terms of
the OCTPL.
See this answer in the FSF GPL FAQ for more details:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs


The actual issue is that FreeCAD is linked with both OpenCASCADE (which
is GPL-incompatible) and Coin3D (which is released under the terms of
the GNU GPL v2).

The problem is that OpenCASCADE copyright owners seem to have been
considering to switch to the GNU LGPL v2.1 for a long time, but they
have not taken a decision yet...   :-(
As I said in the original bug report, I need help in persuading them:
http://bugs.debian.org/617613#5

> 
> Thanks.

You're welcome!

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