On Sun, Jul 19, 2009 at 6:12 PM, Mads Kiilerich<m...@kiilerich.com> wrote: > In the process of trying to get TortoiseHg included in Fedora some licensing > issues popped up. > > First: What does it mean to say that something is under the "GPL" license? > Informally it probably means something like "some kind of GPL and we don't > care/know which version". But because GPLv2 for a long time has been the > only used version of GPL then it probably often means GPLv2. But it is my > understanding that the exact mening of GPL is the first version of GPL, > "GPLv1". The problem is that the different versions of GPL isn't compatible. > And the "or later" freedom only applies if stated explicitly. > > Mercurial is explicitly and intentionally (mostly) GPLv2 only. All code > linking to it must thus also be GPLv2 (or compatible). And all code derived > from Mercurial must also be licensed under the license of Mercurial. > Mercurial has previously been pretty unclear/misleading about that, but it > was cleaned up in 46293a0c7e9f where "all" references to "GPL" were replaced > by "GPLv2". > > TortoiseHg says clearly in setup.py that it is 'GNU GPL2', and COPYING.txt > says the same. Fine. > > But the following TortoiseHg files says they are "GPL": > contrib/nautilus-thg.py > hggtk/gdialog.py > hggtk/hgshelve.py > thgutil/shlib.py > thgutil/settings.py > thgutil/version.py > thgutil/i18n.py > thgutil/hglib.py > thgutil/paths.py > hggtk/visdiff.py (derived from Mercurial extdiff.py which now is GPLv2) > I am not sure it is legal to link "GPL" code with Mercurials "GPLv2" code at > all. Could you please clarify and resolve this? Assuming GPLv2 has been the > intention then just say that instead. Consistently using a header like the > one used in Mercurial now would make it a lot simpler to verify the > licensing.
GPLv2 is the intended license. I'll adopt Mercurial's header style. Do I need to make these changes on the stable branch in order for 0.8.N to be considered for inclusion? > A couple of files do seem to be derived from Python. They says "See > LICENSE-PSF & LICENSE for details". That is problematic because there are no > such files in TortoiseHg: > thgutil/iniparse/config.py > thgutil/iniparse/compat.py This is http://code.google.com/p/iniparse/. We use it entirely unmodified. Bundling it was the simplest solution at the time since the project only had a tarfile. I see they now have .deb and .rpm packages so an option would be to simply add iniparse as a dependency and add iniparse to thg-installer for Windows builds. -- Steve Borho ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge This is your chance to win up to $100,000 in prizes! For a limited time, vendors submitting new applications to BlackBerry App World(TM) will have the opportunity to enter the BlackBerry Developer Challenge. See full prize details at: http://p.sf.net/sfu/Challenge _______________________________________________ Tortoisehg-develop mailing list Tortoisehg-develop@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tortoisehg-develop
