[Qgis-developer] Mixing GPL-2 & GPL-3 code in QGIS (official Debian package rejected by FTP master)

[Sebastiaan Couwenberg]

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Hi Jürgen,

On 02/28/2015 10:47 PM, Jürgen E. Fischer wrote:
> On Sat, 28. Feb 2015 at 19:21:23 +0100, Sebastiaan Couwenberg
> wrote:
>> The dxf2shp_converter plugin contains code under GPL-2 (v2 only),
>> GPL-2+ (v2 or later), MIT, LGPL-2+ and commercial licenses. This
>> is documented in the debian/copyright file as follows:
>> 
> 
> The GPL-2 code in dxf2shp can be removed.  And the dxf2shp lib can
> be upgraded to 3.7.5 that is licensed under GPL-2+.   The
> getInsertions code is trivial and AFAICT the handling is wrong
> anyway - the content of a block is only inserted once at the
> location of the first insert instead of repeatedly on every 
> location of the inserts.   It's probably better to handle inserts
> similar to the texts.
> 
> After that there's not GPL-2 only code in QGIS, right?

That's right, the dxf2shp converter plugin is the only one with GPL-2
licensed files.

I've updated the Debian packaging to exclude the dxf2shp converter
plugin from the upstream tarball, and patched the build to not install
the library. That should address this issue on the Debian side for the
time being.

Upgrading the library to the current version in which the license
issue is resolved sounds much better on the longer term.

>> Removing the dxf2shp_converter plugin from QGIS would get rid of
>> the problematic GPL-2 licensed works, but the inclusion of GPL-3+
>> works still upgrades the GPL-2+ license for QGIS to GPL-3+.
> 
> Would that be a problem?  In that case Debian is free to
> redistribute.

It's not a problem with the DFSG, but it may not be the intention or
desire of the QGIS developers.

>> Excluding the GPL-3+ resources doesn't look very problematic at
>> first glance, but I expect the removal of libpal to cause more
>> breakage.
> 
> That would kill labeling.

Enough reason to keep it, or search for a GPL-2+ replacement if the
upgrade to GPL-3+ is considered problematic.

>> Besides the GPL-2/GPL-3 issue, one of the resources also has
>> problematic license terms:
> 
>> Files: resources/cpt-city-qgis-min/es/* Copyright: 2008,
>> ElvenSword (http://elvensword.deviantart.com/) Comment: Credit
>> requested for use, required for distribution License: ElvenSword
> 
> Looks like there are more with non-free license and also stuff that
> is GPL-2 only.  I suppose we can remove all of those too. Etienne?

The only other issue I found with the resources is that it seems
resources/cpt-city-qgis-min/nd/COPYING.xml does not correspond to the
CC-BY-SA-3.0 license stated on the DeviantArt page (and d/copyright).

Kind Regards,

Bas

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