Bug 126466 - librpm should be LGPL
Summary: librpm should be LGPL
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Fedora
Classification: Fedora
Component: rpm
Version: 2
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jeff Johnson
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2004-06-22 02:59 UTC by Nathan Robertson
Modified: 2007-11-30 22:10 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Doc Type: Enhancement
Doc Text:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2004-06-24 09:56:31 UTC
Type: ---
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description Nathan Robertson 2004-06-22 02:59:06 UTC
Description of problem:
I'm currently working on a proprietary product, which is written in C,
which would like to query the RPM database at startup to find out
whether a particular third party package (Sun's j2re Java Runtime, in
our case) is installed, and if so, where certain files are (their
location changes by release). This massively simplifies the setup of
our product from an end user perspective.

I have working code which queries librpm for the information, but
can't use it because librpm is GPL. Really, any product (GPL
compatible or otherwise) should be allowed to look up the RPM database
in this way, as it simplifies the user experience greatly.

On Windows we look up registry keys for this information (Sun set
these keys during the JRE installation), and on RPM based
distributions have useful information in the RPM database. Please give
us the ability to look up librpm programatically in GPL incompatible
products (for which RHEL, which we are planning to explicitly support,
is marketed to this audience).

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2004-06-23 13:34:17 UTC
librpm *is* LGPL, always has been.

Comment 2 Nathan Robertson 2004-06-24 03:32:11 UTC
If that's the case, then why does "rpm -qi rpm" report it as GPL? (quoting off a Red Hat 9 
box below, because the FC2 box we have is on another network).

[nathanr@lnx bugzilla-2.16.5]$ rpm -qi rpm
Name        : rpm                          Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version     : 4.2                               Vendor: Red Hat, Inc.
Release     : 0.69                          Build Date: Fri 28 Feb 2003 08:24:23 EST
Install Date: Mon 13 Oct 2003 14:08:03 EST      Build Host: stripples.devel.redhat.com
Group       : System Environment/Base       Source RPM: rpm-4.2-0.69.src.rpm
Size        : 4718370                          License: GPL
Signature   : DSA/SHA1, Fri 28 Feb 2003 08:26:49 EST, Key ID 219180cddb42a60e
Packager    : Red Hat, Inc. <http://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla>
Summary     : The RPM package management system.
Description :
The RPM Package Manager (RPM) is a powerful command line driven
package management system capable of installing, uninstalling,
verifying, querying, and updating software packages. Each software
package consists of an archive of files along with information about
the package like its version, a description, etc.

Comment 3 Jeff Johnson 2004-06-24 09:56:31 UTC
rpm has 3 licenses, GPL, LGPL, and X11. There's also another
license for embedded elfutils these days.

The intent for librpm has always been LGPL, and that
is the license that applies.

Check with the Red Hat lawyers rather than rpm -qi
if you don't believe me.

Yes, very confusing, can't be helped.


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