Bug#617613: freecad: links with both GPL-licensed and GPL-incompatible libraries

[Francesco Poli]

On Fri, 14 Sep 2012 16:31:21 -0400 Andres Cimmarusti wrote:

> On Thu, Apr 19, 2012 at 8:38 AM, Andres Cimmarusti
> <acimmarusti at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> Fortunately Kongsberg, the company behind Coin3D, send a letter to all its paying customer that they decided to discontinue the commercial Version and plan to release the source under BSD. This switch and the removal of smaller libs (e.g. PyQt) will remove all GPL dependencies of FreeCAD.
> >
> > This may be true, but their website still shows the paid and GPL
> > version. Is there any updates regarding this? It's been months since
> > this 'news'.
> 
> This change has been finally carried out!
> 
> https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/wiki/Home

Interesting news!
Thanks for informing us.

> 
> Can this bug now be closed? or do we need to wait for freecad 0.13?

I think the bug should stay open with severity serious, until a freecad
package that is actually unaffected by this issue is uploaded to the
Debian archive.
As far as I can see:

 * a new version of Coin3D, released under the terms of the 3-clause
BSD license, needs to be packaged and uploaded to the Debian archive
(relevant Debian source packages: soqt, coin3)

 * a new version of FreeCAD, without any included GPL-licensed part and
not linking with any GPL-licensed library, needs to be packaged with a
dependency on the BSD-licensed Coin3D packages and uploaded to the
Debian archive

The latter package will close this bug report in its changelog.


Maybe, in the meanwhile, the freecad Debian package maintainers may ask
the release managers to grant a wheezy-ignore tag for this bug report...


I hope this clarifies my opinion.
Thanks for your time!

Bye.

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