Control: retitle -1 Legally problematic GPL-3+ readline dependency
Severity: serious
On Fri, 18 Dec 2020 10:47:22 +0100 Bastian Germann wrote:
Package: atari800
Version: 4.1.0-3
Severity: normal
atari800's copyright file claims it to be GPLv2. In most source files,
the license text has an "or later" clause which is actually needed
linking the program with readline (GPLv3), because GPLv3 and GPLv2-only
are incompatible. So please clarify the license situation in the
copyright file.
The program depends on proprietary ROMs for normal operation, so this is problematic for
GPL by itself. While atari800 itself is most probably unproblematic because it is designed
for that and one could argue that is an implicit grant to use it with the proprietary
ROMs, the readline dependency is not okay, independent from the license version.
Please switch to BSD-licensed libeditreadline-dev as a build dependency which is a drop-in
replacement for libreadline-dev.
You should also explain the contrib status in d/copyright according to Policy
12.5.
