Bug 84853 - License field of popt RPM is wrong
Summary: License field of popt RPM is wrong
Keywords:
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG
Alias: None
Product: Red Hat Linux
Classification: Retired
Component: popt
Version: 8.0
Hardware: All
OS: Linux
medium
medium
Target Milestone: ---
Assignee: Jeff Johnson
QA Contact:
URL:
Whiteboard:
Depends On:
Blocks:
TreeView+ depends on / blocked
 
Reported: 2003-02-22 03:13 UTC by James Henstridge
Modified: 2008-05-01 15:38 UTC (History)
0 users

Fixed In Version:
Clone Of:
Environment:
Last Closed: 2003-02-22 03:44:22 UTC
Embargoed:


Attachments (Terms of Use)

Description James Henstridge 2003-02-22 03:13:38 UTC
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2) Gecko/20021202

Description of problem:
The popt RPM on my system claims to be GPL, yet the license included in the
source code seems to be an X11 style license.

It would be good to include a copy of the COPYING file in the RPM, as well as
include the license terms as a comment at the top of the headers and source.

I am mainly bringing this up because the issue was raised by the FSF in relation
to the copy of popt included with the pkg-config program.  Details of this
original report can be found at:
    http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=84804

Would be useful to see this fixed.

Comment 1 Jeff Johnson 2003-02-22 03:44:22 UTC
Yes, very confusing. AFAIK, here's the licensing for rpm/popt:

    1) popt source code is X11, so the license in the popt tree
     is correct.
    2) when distributed with rpm, the license is the same
     as that of the rpm CLI, namely GPL, so the binary popt
     sub-package correctly identifies as GPL. rpm sources have
     a copy of COPYING.
    3) rpmlib (and rpm sources in general) are LGPL, no GPL
     code at all.



Comment 2 James Henstridge 2003-02-22 07:54:00 UTC
Thanks for the clarification.  I have put the full copyright terms in the
comments at the start of the popt files in pkg-config.

It might be worth doing the same for the official versions as well to save any
later grief.  There is nothing wrong with including a bit of code with an X11
style license in a GPL program (the only requirement is that the combined work
be distributable under the GPL; it doesn't require that the individual
components be changed to GPL.


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