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It’s completely possible to combine GPL and AGPL software with, e.g., BSD- or MIT-licensed software. The resulting software is GPL- or AGP-licensed, and the us

It’s completely possible to combine GPL and AGPL software with, e.g., BSD- or MIT-licensed software. The resulting software is GPL- or AGP-licensed, and the users are not restricted from doing anything. I honestly thought that this was a license scanner for actually restrictive — i.e. non-free-software — licenses until I visited the repo. It would be good to know if I accidentally use some piece of software with some source-available license.

sunshowers 2y ago
Combine if they are independent pieces of software, yes. Whether linking (hard or soft/plugin) counts is a matter of legal uncertainty. The FSF has consistently said that a single function call into a GPL library constitutes a derivative work, but other legal experts disagree [1]. Certainly, if I maintain a repo which calls a function in a GPL library, it would be misleading for me to say that my repo is MIT-licensed. I could potentially say that my specific code bits are MIT-licensed but that (per the FSF's interpretation) if you import my library, your resulting artifacts are GPL. That is quite hard to communicate, and it also rests on a particular interpretation of the license that is the most common one but isn't universally accepted. It also becomes tricky with distributed copyright ownership without a CLA, the way most open source projects are run. I think that this rises to the level of "impossible to use". But I guess one specific point here is that if you download my MIT-licensed-but-links-to-GPL repo, and rip out all of the bits that link to GPL libraries, you can use my code under MIT. Compare this to MPL 2 which has none of these issues, and very little legal uncertainty in general. There is still some uncertainty regarding what constitutes a copyrightable work, though. [1] https://tech.popdata.org/the-gpl-license-and-linking-still-unclear-after-30-years/ https://tech.popdata.org/the-gpl-license-and-linking-still-u...

sunshowers 2y ago

Combine if they are independent pieces of software, yes. Whether linking (hard or soft/plugin) counts is a matter of legal uncertainty. The FSF has consistently said that a single function call into a GPL library constitutes a derivative work, but other legal experts disagree [1]. Certainly, if I maintain a repo which calls a function in a GPL library, it would be misleading for me to say that my repo is MIT-licensed. I could potentially say that my specific code bits are MIT-licensed but that (per the FSF's interpretation) if you import my library, your resulting artifacts are GPL. That is quite hard to communicate, and it also rests on a particular interpretation of the license that is the most common one but isn't universally accepted. It also becomes tricky with distributed copyright ownership without a CLA, the way most open source projects are run. I think that this rises to the level of "impossible to use". But I guess one specific point here is that if you download my MIT-licensed-but-links-to-GPL repo, and rip out all of the bits that link to GPL libraries, you can use my code under MIT. Compare this to MPL 2 which has none of these issues, and very little legal uncertainty in general. There is still some uncertainty regarding what constitutes a copyrightable work, though. [1] https://tech.popdata.org/the-gpl-license-and-linking-still-unclear-after-30-years/ https://tech.popdata.org/the-gpl-license-and-linking-still-u...