Re: EPL and GPL incompatibility

[Ángel González]

On 10/09/16 16:45, George Bateman wrote:

Also, if upstream are wrong, is the mechanism described at
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs
sufficient to resolve the problem?
Yes, they should granting an additional permission to link with 
libraries covered by the Eclipse Public License. Granting that shouldn't 
be a problem since they already think it's allowed.


The only nitpick is that all copyright holders (of the GPL code linking 
with incompatible libs) would need to agree on this, not just eg. the 
main developer.

EPL and GPL incompatibility

[George Bateman]

Dear Debian Legal Team,

I'm trying to package Processing , a program
written in Java to teach programming, for Debian. Its licensing is
split into two parts, GNU LGPLv2.1 (for the "processing.core" package)
and GNU GPLv2 (for its other packages). It is currently distributed
with .jar files from Eclipse, licensed under the Eclipse Public
License [EPL], listed at
,
which are linked to a number of files in the GPL portion of the
program. (The program also links to Apache 2.0-licensed libraries, so
I assume it will need to be upgraded to LGPLv3 and GPLv3.)

I asked upstream whether they thought linking to Eclipse libraries was
okay at https://github.com/processing/processing/issues/4528, and they
said it was as they aren't modifying the Eclipse code, but the
statement on the Eclipse website says that no linking between GPL and
EPL code is permitted. Who's correct here?

Also, if upstream are wrong, is the mechanism described at
https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs
sufficient to resolve the problem?

Many thanks,

George Bateman.