MJ Ray
Wed, 08 Feb 2012 12:29:58 -0800
Fabian Greffrath <fab...@greffrath.com> > [Posting this again to debian-legal, as suggested by Jonas. Keeping > pkg-multimedia and pkg-gstreamer in CC for this initial mail, but > please keep replying to -legal. Sorry for the inconvenience!] I'm confused by the above, so I'm keeping all the CCs. > [...], but according to their respective debian/copyright > files, the packages are still released under the terms of the GPL-2+. > Is this simply an oversight and should get changed to GPL-3? As I understand it (IANAL), no: the sources are still GPL-2+ because they don't contain anything requiring them to change. > For the same reason we have a libav-extra package in Debian which > provides a libavcodec library linked against the aforementioned > libraries. According to its debian/copyright file, the GPL-3 applies > to the resulting binary packages. What does this mean for packages > linking against this variant of libavcodec? What are the exact license > incompatibilities that we want to avoid by providing this variant? I think that is best asked of its Maintainer. > Does this mean that a package which is licensed under GPL-2 (not 2+) > cannot get linked against the GPL-3'ed libavcodec? Yes, that's what it means. Source: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#v2v3Compatibility Is GPLv3 compatible with GPLv2? (#v2v3Compatibility) No. Some of the requirements in GPLv3, such as the requirement to provide Installation Information, do not exist in GPLv2. As a result, the licenses are not compatible: if you tried to combine code released under both these licenses, you would violate section 6 of GPLv2. Hope that informs, -- MJR/slef My Opinion Only: see http://people.debian.org/~mjr/ Please follow http://www.uk.debian.org/MailingLists/#codeofconduct -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-legal-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/e1rve9c-0001pj...@petrol.towers.org.uk