[101731] trunk/dports/devel/gettext/Portfile

[Joshua Root]

On 2013-1-19 13:58 , Ryan Schmidt wrote:
> On Jan 18, 2013, at 19:47, Joshua Root <jmr at macports.org> wrote:
> 
>> Do you realise this effectively makes gettext GPL-3 rather than
>> LGPL-2.1+, which will negatively impact distributability of its dependents?
> 
> No, I had not realized that.
> 
> You're basing this on the declaration "license GPL-3" in the libunistring portfile?

Yes.

> The file README in the libunistring distribution contains the following statement:
> 
>> Copyright
>> ---------
>>
>> The libunistring library and its header files are under the GNU LGPL, see
>> file COPYING.LIB.  This license is based on the GNU GPL, see file COPYING.
>>
>> The documentation is under another license; see in the documentation.
> 
> Based on this I would say that "license GPL-3" in the libunistring portfile is wrong and should be changed to LGPL-3 or possibly LGPL-3+, I'm not sure. (The comments in the source files say GPL 3 or later.)

If the comments in the source files say GPL-3+, that's what those files
are under, unless the copyright holder has elsewhere given permission to
distribute under another license. If the sole copyright holder also
wrote the README, I guess that might count, but in any case it's pretty
unclear. We really can't just assume we know what they meant.

> Would that resolve the situation to your satisfaction, or is your objection about (L)GPL 3 vs 2.1? If the latter, I can certainly revert the inclusion of libunistring and instead go the other way and ensure it is not used.

LGPL-3(+) isn't as bad, though it still conflicts with GPL-2.

-Josh