Le Fri, Sep 12, 2025 at 10:42:56AM +0300, Ilmari Tamminen a écrit :
I am very likely to ask about the topic from a software lawyer for my particular case. But to form educated questions, I first need to get some basic understanding, and also hear how the community thinks about these issues.
Hi Ilmari, there is an important point to consider in order to have the big picture before asking for legal advice: on whom is the burden of license compatibility. I first wrote a long example, but here is a LLM summary that I am very satisfied of: GPL‑2‑only and GPL‑3 are not license‑compatible when combined into a single derivative work, but this is rarely an issue for developers who only distribute source code — private use is unrestricted, and separate works can be redistributed side‑by‑side. The problem arises when redistributing binaries or other combined artefacts: if any binary contains code from both, it cannot be legally redistributed. This risk extends to container images: while a generic image bundling many unrelated packages is usually fine, an image built to run two incompatible‑licensed components together could be considered a single work, triggering the same restrictions. So I think that the big question is not only on how you comply to license terms, some of which you can chose as you are the copyright holder, but also how your choices empower the downstream community to comply. Best, Charles -- Charles Plessy Nagahama, Yomitan, Okinawa, Japan Debian Med packaging team http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med Tooting from work, https://fediscience.org/@charles_plessy Tooting from home, https://framapiaf.org/@charles_plessy ______________________________________________ [email protected] mailing list https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-package-devel
