[Mageia-webteam] Forum installation (almost) complete

Michael Scherer misc at zarb.org
Wed Feb 23 13:12:13 CET 2011


Le mercredi 23 février 2011 à 12:03 +0100, Romain d'Alverny a écrit :
> On Wed, Feb 23, 2011 at 11:54, Michael Scherer <misc at zarb.org> wrote:
> > Le mercredi 23 février 2011 à 10:21 +0100, Maât a écrit :
> >> Le 23/02/2011 10:06, Michael Scherer a écrit :
> >> >
> >> > The phpbb_seo package is under a license called RPL, according to the
> >> > COPYING file. This license  among others force us to provides the source
> >> > code of the forum if we deploy it ( even privately ) for at least for 12
> >> > months after we decided to stop use it.
> >> >
> >> > That's quite a strong requirement, but that's not the only issue.
> >> >
> >> > FSF say this is not compatible with GPL. ( see
> >> > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#NonFreeSoftwareLicense ,
> >> > search "reciprocal public license", there is also others reasons )
> >> >
> >> > Phpbb is distributed under the GPL, and I would like to be sure there is
> >> > nothing fishy about that.
> >>
> >> We could relicense the whole under AGPL v3 which fullfills all requirements (and a little more) ?
> >
> > I wish that would be so simple.
> 
> Then couldn't we just keep both separate in our repository (with each
> relative licenses) and have those integrated only for the production
> server? or too complex?

phpbb-seo modifie the code of phpbb directly for integration.

See the git snapshot ( git://git.mageia.org/forum/ using a git client,
and grep -r -i seo ). So the question is "what is the license of the
resulting file, as it mix 2 incompatibles licenses". I am pretty sure
that the GPL forbid such mix ( as this is the reason of the creation of
LGPL ).

> (I mean, if that isn't even possible, that would mean that phpbb-seo
> is in a dead end from the beginning wrt to license requirements from
> both its own RPL and phpbb's GPL)

Well, yes, they could perfectly do gpl violation without knowing. I am
not sure about this but this would requires IMHO a opinion from a
lawyer. I have tried to read the FAQ of the FSF, and the only thing that
would be similar is this :
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleAlone

So :
2 questions :
1) who is volunteer to contact upstream ?
2) what do we do in the meantime ?
-- 
Michael Scherer



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