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dscalzi / HeliosLauncher

☀ Custom launcher for modded minecraft written in Electron and Node.js
MIT License
838 stars 1.73k forks source link

License not compatible with helios-core #247

Closed blarfoon closed 2 years ago

blarfoon commented 2 years ago

I just noticed this repo is marked as MIT but a dependency (helios-core) is LGPL. These 2 licenses are completely incompatible hence making this codebase effectively proprietary. Can this be solved?

dscalzi commented 2 years ago

LGPL is not a proprietary license and it is perfectly fine to have an MIT licensed product use a LGPL library. Not sure what the hangup here is?

blarfoon commented 2 years ago

You can't use an LGPL license under a more permissive license (MIT) because that means that you are allowing people to use the LGPL library included in this repo in proprietary code as well (allowed by MIT but not by LGPL). This is why they are incompatible.

dscalzi commented 2 years ago

That's not accurate. The license is the GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0. An MIT licensed product can use a LGPL library subject to the conditions of the license.

"A larger work using the licensed work through interfaces provided by the licensed work may be distributed under different terms and without source code for the larger work."

"Using the Lesser GPL permits use of the library in proprietary programs; using the ordinary GPL for a library makes it available only for free programs."

If you wish to modify helios-core then you are subject to the terms of the LGPL license. The LGPL license does not apply to the larger work (Helios Launcher) which only interacts with helios-core through its interfaces.

blarfoon commented 2 years ago

Oh you're right, I missed the (L) part of the license, my bad. Thanks for clarifying it

dscalzi commented 2 years ago

No problem, easy to miss haha