Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 84853
License field of popt RPM is wrong
Last modified: 2008-05-01 11:38:05 EDT
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.
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.
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.