[Debichem-devel] ELPA license and packaging

[Michael Banck]

Dear ELPA maintainers,

in order to package the ELPA library for the Debian/Ubuntu
distributions, we have taken a look at the license and believe there are
some issues to be discussed.

To our knowledge, this is the copyright statement:

|Copyright of the original code rests with the authors inside the ELPA
|consortium. The copyright of any additional modifications shall rest
|with their original authors, but shall adhere to the licensing terms
|set forth below.

|The code is distributed under ALMOST all of the the terms of the GNU
|Lesser General Public License version 3 (LGPL). The full text
|can be found in the file "lgpl.txt" in this repository. "lgpl.txt"
|makes reference to the GPL v3, which can also be found in this
|repository ("gpl.txt").

|While we are not allowed to alter the license texts as written in those 
|files, IN ADDITION our own license prescribes two important
|modifications / clarifications to the original lgpl.txt:

|- In point 2., clause b) - stating that that you may redistribute
|  under the terms of the plain GNU GPL - shall NOT apply. In other
|  words, if you redistribute, you MUST keep the additional permissions
|  of the LGPL v3 in place.

Please note that it is our understanding that this clause is designed to
establish license compatibility with the GPL.  In other words, removing 
this clause makes the ELPA license incompatible with the GPL and
therefore the ELPA library unable to be used/distributed by GPL
projects.

Is this the goal of the ELPA project?  Is your concern that 3rd party
projects might distribute modifications to the ELPA library under the
GPL only, thereby making it impossible to incorporate these changes into
your source tree? 

|- If you redistribute, you must redistribute under the terms of the
|  LGPL version specified here. Using later or earlier versions
|  published by anyone except the ELPA copyright holders is
|  not allowed. 

By simply stating that the ELPA library is under the LGPLv3 (thereby
ommitting the "or later" clause"), you could remove this additional
clause in our opinion.  Disregarding the above issue for the moment, the
easiest way would be to add the standard copyright boilerplate at the
top of each source file:

| This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or
| modify it under the terms of version 3 of the GNU Lesser General
| Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation.

| This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
| but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
| MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.  See the
| GNU General Public License for more details.
	
| You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public
| License along with this program.  If not, see
| <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

However, please note that the FSF has given their promise that further
versions of the LGPL will be in the same spirit as the LGPLv3, and that
by restricting ELPA to LGPLv3 only, you will make it impossible to
combine ELPA with open source projects using later versions of the LGPL
(and GPL, but see above for that).


Best regards,

Michael

PS: I have applied for access to the git repository, but have not heard
back yet.  I guess it takes a while to process the requests?