[Mageia-sysadm] Fwd: Re: Question de licence

[Romain d'Alverny]

On Tue, Mar 15, 2011 at 07:43, Oliver Burger <oliver.bgr at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Am Dienstag 15 März 2011, 00:11:51 schrieb Michael Scherer:
>> Given the fact that all people with enough knowledge wrt opensource
>> licensing I can think of are americans, like Tom Spot ( fedora license
>> guy, who gave us advice for the gsoap issue ), or Eben Moglen ( FSF
>> lawyer ), I think keeping things in english would greatly help to have
>> their opinion.
>>
>> ( and for the record, that's tv who explained to me long time ago why we
>> should use english even for internal discussion in Mandrakesoft , as you
>> never know where you will forward your list ).
>
> Thanks! I was trying to understand, what you were talking about but didn't
> want to ask if you couldn't do it in English...

Well, summarized (correct me if I'm wrong), the thing is:
 * phpbb is under GPL;
 * phpbb-seo, that heavily/exclusively relies on phpbb to provide seo
improvements to it, is under RPL.

Both license are not compatible:
 * RPL requires you to republish the changes you made when integrating
the code into something else;
 * but what license would be the mix under? GPL according to phpbb,
RPL according to phpbb-seo.

phpbb-seo developers show that they don't mean to embarrass people
that want to use the module and republish the changes, their goal is
to avoid commercial/unfair reuse/redistribution of their code. But
that in turn doesn't change the fact that the license is incompatible
with GPL.

So among other possible solutions would be:
 * using both, and going further with the fact that we have a code
repository that is not redistributable at all, since it's a mix of
things whose licenses prevent it to contractually exist (although it
can, that's the fun thing with chimera);
 * not using phpbb-seo as long as the license is not clearly
compatible with GPL (and develop or not our own solution for that).

There may be other clean solutions, but not sure about that.

Romain