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

[Ulrich Mueller]

>>>>> 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.

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.
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.

Ulrich