On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Lasse Laursen <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Now this is all well and good, but when looking closer - at least one > library that PyGame uses seem to be licensed under the regular GPL - for > example the smpeg lib from this location: http://icculus.org/smpeg/ > As you discovered yourself, smpeg is in fact publically distributed under the LGPL. For reference, you can see the license that smpeg is distributed with by downloading it or by looking at copyright file with the source distribution, which is available on the web here: http://svn.icculus.org/smpeg/trunk/COPYING?revision=2&view=markup I know that lawyers don't exactly troll programming mailing lists, but even > some general knowledge would do me good here... I would assume that since > the entire PyGame package has one license, that's the one to keep an eye > on... Which would be the easiest for me without a doubt... All feedback > welcome... > > You are right to be concerned about the licensing terms of the components of a package, regardless of what the licensing terms given with entire package were. Getting a bunch of files as part of a larger package does not guarantee that you actually have the right to distribute all those files under the packages license (i.e. the distributors of the package could be violating copyright of the components, and your ignorance of their violations don't protect you from being wrong if you perpetuate the problem). However on the other hand, if you had looked up a components license for some copy you are given outside a package, and it said "don't distribute this ever!" that wouldn't necessarily mean you couldn't legally distribute the copy of the component you got as part of a package that does say it's licensed for you to distribute freely. The reason why is one thing can be distributed under multiple licenses to different people in different conditions. (i.e. maybe the package distributor is licensed to redistribute the component under whatever license they want, but the component is publically distributed with a different license) My point is, that it's really the specifics of how the content was distributed by copyright holders and licensees that matter. Pygame's LGPL license doesn't tell you anything about whether you actually have rights to distribute components from other copyright holders, it just means you have rights to distribute what the pygame copyright covers, and you just have to trust the pygame people. In this case, however, because you could get and distribute all of pygame's dependencies under the LGPL from the copyright holders, you know you would be fine to get all the dependencies and build yourself and distribute that.
