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stephane / libmodbus

A Modbus library for Linux, Mac OS, FreeBSD and Windows
http://libmodbus.org
GNU Lesser General Public License v2.1
3.4k stars 1.73k forks source link

tarballs (and version branches) contain multiple license versions #221

Closed jasonpeacock closed 10 years ago

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

Hey all, I was hoping to use libmodbus but I'm running into licensing issues - I can't use GPL v3. While the website and master claim to use LGPL v2.1, the stable (3.0.6) and development (3.1.1) tarballs, and the v3.0.x branch, contain both LGPL v2.1 & GPL v3 licenses:

COPYING (v3) COPYING.LESSER (v2.1)

In the master branch there is only the LGPL v2.1 license:

COPYING.LESSER (v2.1)

I see from the commit history that the license version was intentionally reverted from GPL v3 to LGPL v2.1 (yay!) but it looks like those changes were not fully propagated to all branches.

Also, in all(?) branches and tarballs there are many source files which declare the GPL v3 license:

libmodbus-3.1.1/src/modbus-version.h libmodbus-3.1.1/src/modbus-version.h.in libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/bandwidth-client.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/bandwidth-server-many-up.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/bandwidth-server-one.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/random-test-client.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/random-test-server.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/unit-test-client.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/unit-test-server.c libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/unit-test.h libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/unit-test.h.in libmodbus-3.1.1/tests/version.c

Can this license confusion be cleaned up?

Thanks! jason.

stephane commented 10 years ago

I don't intend to rewrite history ;) You can just use latest version of the branch!

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

I'd love to do that :) But the latest version of the branch still has GPL v3 defined in the actual source files, along with the duplicate license files, this is giving my legal team fits :( Even master has this problem.

stephane commented 10 years ago

GPLv3 was for tests/ only, cf README but in latest version (master) tests are under BSD license.

stephane commented 10 years ago

I don't see duplicated license files in master : https://github.com/stephane/libmodbus

2014-06-13 20:51 GMT+02:00 Jason Peacock notifications@github.com:

I'd love to do that :) But the latest version of the branch still has GPL v3 defined in the actual source files, along with the duplicate license files, this is giving my legal team fits :( Even master has this problem.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/stephane/libmodbus/issues/221#issuecomment-46047197.

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

Correct, there are no duplicated license files in master. And good to know that the test/ files are BSD now.

But master does have a leftover GPLv3 file:

https://github.com/stephane/libmodbus/blob/master/src/modbus-version.h.in

It looks like if that file's license is updated then everything is usable :)

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

Awesome, thanks!

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

Sorry to bug you, there's one last line in debian/copyright (in master) that still mentions GLPv3 for the tests:

https://github.com/stephane/libmodbus/blob/master/debian/copyright#L33

I really appreciate all your help, jason.

stephane commented 10 years ago

Good catch! Thank you.

jasonpeacock commented 10 years ago

Thanks again for your help and quick response!