Bug#859793: fluidsynth: Package has infringed GPL

[David Henningsson]

Hi.

This came as a surprise for me. What's worse, it seems like none of the 
maintainers are currently active in Fluidsynth, and AFAIK none of us 
have time to either rewrite fluid_chorus.c, or track down all 
contributors to it since 1998.

What makes things slightly easier for us as upstream is that FluidSynth 
is released under LGPL rather than GPL. LGPL allows linking to custom 
licenses.

Thus, my suggestion for us as upstream is that we clearly document (in 
readme files etc) that we have one file that is not LGPL. That I can do.

Perhaps Debian has the time/manpower required to track down 
contributors? FWIW,

In the event that I should hold any copyright in fluid_chorus.c, I'm 
happy to allow these to be relicensed under GNU
LGPL 2.0+.

Regards,
   David Henningsson

On 2017-04-07 20:01, Jaromír Mikeš wrote:
>
>
> 2017-04-07 14:16 GMT+02:00 Javier Serrano Polo <javier at jasp.net 
> <mailto:javier at jasp.net>>:
>
>     Source: fluidsynth
>     Version: 1.1.6-4
>     Severity: wishlist
>
>     fluid_chorus.c is under a custom license, granting the following:
>
>             This source code is freely redistributable and may be used for
>             any purpose.
>
>
> Hi fluidsynth devs,
>
> we serious licensing issue in debian in fluid_chorus.c file.
> Is there any chance to relicense this file with some GPL friendly license?
> Full bug report here:
> https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=859793
>
> best regards
>
> mira
>