On Fri, 16 Dec 2011 20:06:54 +0100 Anton Gladky wrote: > Hello,
Hi Anton, thanks for following up on this issue. > > does it mean, that FreeCAD upstream and others (gmsh, for example) has > chosen the wrong license? No, I don't think that this is the conclusion we should draw from the issue under consideration. FreeCAD copyright owners chose the GNU LGPL (v2 or later), which is a good choice (and does not prevent, by itself, the distribution of FreeCAD linked with OpenCASCADE). There are some files licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL (v2 or later) included in FreeCAD, and those files may be an issue with respect to OpenCASCADE. But anyway, that's not the point: even in the hypothetical case where the whole FreeCAD were licensed under the terms of the GNU GPL, their copyright owners could always add an exception to allow the distribution of copies linked with works licensed under the terms of the OCTPL. See this answer in the FSF GPL FAQ for more details: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLIncompatibleLibs The actual issue is that FreeCAD is linked with both OpenCASCADE (which is GPL-incompatible) and Coin3D (which is released under the terms of the GNU GPL v2). The problem is that OpenCASCADE copyright owners seem to have been considering to switch to the GNU LGPL v2.1 for a long time, but they have not taken a decision yet... :-( As I said in the original bug report, I need help in persuading them: http://bugs.debian.org/617613#5 > > Thanks. You're welcome! -- http://www.inventati.org/frx/frx-gpg-key-transition-2010.txt New GnuPG key, see the transition document! ..................................................... Francesco Poli . GnuPG key fpr == CA01 1147 9CD2 EFDF FB82 3925 3E1C 27E1 1F69 BFFE
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