Re: [gentoo-dev] Contributed ebuilds and copyright questions

[Rich Freeman]

On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 11:53 AM, Ulrich Mueller <ulm@g.o> wrote:
>>>>>> On Tue, 25 Oct 2016, Rich Freeman wrote:
>
>>> Also, calling eclass functions could be considered linking. It is not
>>> entirely clear to me if e.g. a binpkg built with a CDDL licensed
>>> ebuild calling GPL licensed eclasses would be distributable at all.
>
>> Honestly, I think the GPL linking argument is a difficult one at best,
>> but setting that aside I think it is even harder to consider calling a
>> function in an interpreted language "linking."  Is it a violation of
>> the GPL to execute a GPL binary from a bash script that is
>> GPL-incompatible?  Heck, is it a violation of the other license for
>> the GPL bash interpreter to read and execute the non-GPL lines in the
>> script?
>
> Generally, the user can execute any combination of such functions on
> his system, without violating their licenses. The question is if a
> combined work containing parts of the ebuild and of the eclass can be
> distributed.

Sure, I'll buy that much.

> Now a Gentoo binary package contains an xpak part, which in turn
> contains a file named environment.bz2 where you will find functions
> originating both from the ebuild and from its inherited eclasses.

Sure, and I wasn't really speaking to the ability to redistribute
binary packages.  I was concerned more with the ebuilds themselves,
and the on-disk packages.

However, other distros do actually consider their binary packages to
be combinations of incompatible licenses in some cases, and they argue
that this is mere aggregation.  In this case we're talking about
aggregating ebuild and eclass functions and that is probably a step
further down the line from what other distros are likely doing.

> Certainly the xpak is a derived work of ebuild _and_ eclasses, so for
> distributing the binpkg both CDDL (to come back to the original
> example) and GPL-2 would have to be honoured. Which is not possible
> because these two licenses are incompatible.

Maybe.  They're aggregated, but whether this prevents redistribution
is another matter.  You could provide the source for the whole, and
tell the recipient that the various functions in the package are
redistributable under their original licenses.  It is trivial to split
an environment file back into its component functions.

Again, I wasn't really considering binary packages and I tend to agree
that mixed licenses do complicate this situation.

-- 
Rich