On 26/02/24 17:21, Chary Chary wrote:
Dear all,
I just noticed, that the products which I would call
beancount derivatives (e.g. fava or smart_importer) are
licensed with MIT license. However beancount itself is GPL-2.
I am not a legal person, but I am just wondering, shouldn't they also
have to be GPL?
I know there is always a question as to how much of the original
beancount code is reused in them
AFAIK no Beancount code is reused (in the sense of have been copied) in
Fava or smart_importer. What Fava, smart_importer, and many other
projects do is to link to the Beancount code. This is not what is
usually defined as derivative work.
Linking to code licensed under the GPL is allowed when the code linking
to it is released under a license compatible with the GPL. Licenses
compatible with the GPL are licenses that give users the same or more
rights (often called freedoms, in the copyleft world). The MIT license
is compatible with the GPL, thus Fava and smart_importer are not
violating the Beancount license.
The situation is more complex for projects derived from Fava or
smart_importer. The MIT license would, in principle, allow anyone to
take their code and use it to develop something with a much more
restrictive license. However, this would violate the Beancount license.
Therefore the MIT license applies to Fava or smart_importer only for the
part of code that does not interact (directly or indirectly) with Beancount.
Cheers,
Dan
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