License clarification - Githubissues

nhorman / dropwatch

user space utility to interface to kernel dropwatch facility

GNU General Public License v2.0

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License clarification #14

Closed jacmet closed 5 years ago

jacmet commented 5 years ago

Hello,

We're included dropwatch for a number of years in Buildroot, but recently noticed a potential licensing issue regarding readline. Can you clarify please? Judging by the lack of "any later version", dropwatch is GPL-2.0 only, but it links against libreadline which is GPL-3.0+.

Those two licenses are not compatible, so that is no good. What is the effective license of dropwatch linked with libreadline supposed to be?

nhorman commented 5 years ago

Its a typo, dropwatch should be GPLv2 or later, I'll fix it shortly

jacmet commented 5 years ago

@nhorman I still do not see any license changes in the repo?

nhorman commented 5 years ago

Because I went an looked, and the COPYING file very clearly does state that the license is GPL-v2 or later, making it not strictly GPLv2, but for claritys sake, I'm attaching SPDX headers to all the source

jacmet commented 5 years ago

Yes, the generic GPL-2.0 COPYING file mentions the "any later" text, but this is normally clarified in the GPL headers in the individual source files.

E.G. the GPL header in src/main.c states:

This program file is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the
Free Software Foundation; version 2 of the License.

So nothing about "(at your option) any later version"