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pololu / pololu-tic-software

Software and drivers for the Pololu Tic Stepper Motor Controller.
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Applicable license? #6

Closed jomade closed 2 years ago

jomade commented 2 years ago

In the source distribution, there are four license files. Two are related to integrated code (yaml and xml2) with MIT-like licenses. Then there is a permissive license and a GPLv3. What of the code is licensed with GPLv3 or can one just select whether the permissive or the GPLv3 is applied? Thanks!

DavidEGrayson commented 2 years ago

It sounds like you are just asking about the source code in this repository, and not any kind of binary files.

So, to answer your question, none of the source code in this repository is licensed with the GPLv3.

If you want permissions for the code in this repository written by Pololu, can license it from us by following the terms in our license file, LICENSE.txt.

If you want permissions for the libyaml and tinyxml2 code in this repository (which we did not write), you can license it from the copyright holders for those libraries by finding the appropriate license for each library and following the terms of it. Each of those libraries comes with a license in the source code, and we have placed copies of those licenses at the top level of this repository to make the situation more clear.

You said "the permissive" in your question. Please note that there is no single license that grants permissions to all the code in this repository, since this repository holds copyrighted works from different parties.

jomade commented 2 years ago

Thank you for the swift answer!

No source code is licensed with the GPLv3 - excellent.

Why is the GPLv3 included in the repository? (at least for me this is confusing...)

DavidEGrayson commented 2 years ago

You saw the sentence at the top of LICENSE_GPLv3.txt, right?

This is the license for the binary software distribution.

When we build a binary version of the Tic software, we have to use some GPL libraries, so we include that file in the LICENSE.html file that we generate for each binary version.

jomade commented 2 years ago

Hi!

You saw the sentence at the top of LICENSE_GPLv3.txt, right?

No, actually, I didn't. Then I understand. Thanks!

Maybe you want to consider to rename the LICENSE_GPLv3.txt to LICENSE_binarydist_GPLv3.txt then it would be more in line with the naming convention of the other license files (i.e. LICENSE_libyaml.txt) - and/or add a section in the readme for this ...

Thanks for your help!