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. 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 /Mads ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ 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
