Re: [TCLCORE] GPL Licence in TCLLib added

[<msc...@po...>]

Am 06.11.2024 12:08 schrieb Poor Yorick:
> 
> "Contagious" is a mischaracterization.  A project chooses derive its 
> work from
> a GPL-licensed work or not.  It doesn't involuntarily "get infected".
> filtergen.tcl is licensed under the GPL, and if it disappears from 
> Tcllib,
> where will it be placed?  Some other GPL analogue of Tcllib?  The point 
> of
> Tcllib is to make it easier for projects to get their hands on software 
> they
> want to use.  Why not then just have branch in Tcllib for such things?  
> Or even
> better just make the license clear and let projects choose for 
> themselves what
> works from Tcllib they will use?

It is indeed contagious in a certain way.

Tcllib gets distributed by various groups. Linux distros, commercial 
programs etc.
By including a (A)GPL licensed module, you suddenly make distribution of 
the whole
tcllib much much harder (or impossible) for lots of organisations, even 
for unused modules,
as GPL talks about distribution mostly.
Thats contagious.

Tcllib is not an package repository, where people pick modules for use, 
its usually distributed as a whole.

A second common pitfall is dependency management. If GPL licenses code 
is included in Tcllib,
any package require of another tcllib must be audited to ensure license 
compliance of the resulting combination.
Thats much easier with a common license for all involved packages.

Michael

P.S. But it might be a good idea to add explicit license identifiers 
like "# SPDX-License-Identifier: MIT" to the tcllib files to
ease automated license compliance reasoning. Then CI could check if the 
policy is kept.