Way of determining license

Nicolas Pavillon nicos at macports.org
Fri Dec 14 10:29:13 PST 2012


Hello, 

I was just checking some licenses on some ports, and I realised the one of kdelibs4 is wrong at the present time. However, I am a bit confused about determining the proper license. For now, it is set to GPL-2+, which is the most restrictive of what is contained in the codes, but it should be "GPL-2+ LGPL-2+ BSD Permissive" to account for all licenses contained in the code. 

However, the GPL codes seem to be essentially testing codes, and may not be part of the used executables. Furthermore, kdelibs is commonly considered licensed under LGPL, as it is the one announced by KDE, and Fedora distributes packages for example. 

I am not fully sure of the criterion in a case like this in order to choose the license. Therefore, I am wondering if I should list everything (GPL-2+ LGPL-2+ BSD Permissive), or if I should limit to what is commonly considered (LGPL-2+ BSD Permissive), which would make the port distributable ?

Cheers, 

Nicolas


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