kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Wayne Stambaugh <stambaughw@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 3/26/2015 4:17 AM, Javier Serrano wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 26, 2015 at 4:36 AM, Cirilo Bernardo
> <cirilo.bernardo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> [ snip ]
>> The only really tricky part comes from the 'v3' bit - according to the FSF
>> the AGPLv3 is not compatible with GPL2, and not even compatible with
>> GPLv3 but OK to mix with GPLv3 (whatever that means - I can already
>> hear some lawyers laughing).
> 
> [ IANAL, please take the following as the opinion of a non-expert. ]
> 
> This is why the '+'  (i.e. the "or-later") in "GPL2+" is really
> important. The KiCad sources are, to the best of my knowledge, GPL2+
> (most) and GPL3+ (the P&S router). That means that the mix is
> effectively GPL3+. SISL seems to be AGPL3+. I see no incompatibility
> (see section 13 of both licenses), but mixing in AGPL3+ code is a step
> in the "stronger copyleft" direction. This is a strategic decision to
> be taken, IMHO by the project leader.

Mixing licenses is always tricky business.  You risk licensing yourself
into a corner.  I am not an expert on licensing and I would never
pretend otherwise.  That being said, if the AGPLv3 license prevents us
from using the SISL source for cloud services as others have suggested
then I cannot not accept that.  I think making KiCad into some type of
collaborative online service like google docs would be something that is
worthwhile.  If this is not the case, then I have less of an issue.

> 
>> Any thoughts on eventually having SISL as a dependency? What's the
>> current status of licensing of KiCad source modules? I can remove
>> the SISL dependency but this will cripple the IGES code by removing
>> the ability to check the validity of some structures within an input file.

Assuming the licensing is not an issue (which appears not to be the
case), there are substantial dependency related issues that have to be
addressed before I would accept a new dependency.  SISL must build and
install on all three platforms supported by KiCad using the normal `make
&& make install` commands.  Whether autotools or CMake or some other
configuration tool is used doesn't matter as long as it is supported on
all three platforms.  I will not allow another dependency build (like
boost) to be added to the KiCad source.  The dependency build code that
we currently have will be removed after the stable release.

> 
> There is still the misleading COPYRIGHT.txt in the root of the KiCad
> sources, which I think should just be removed. This is important, and
> I hope it can be done before the stable release.

I believe it's a fairly common practice to include a copy of the GPL in
a project's source code so I will remove the GPL2 only part that Dick
added to the top of the license file if that is not objectionable.  I'm
assuming that no other modifications have been made to the GPL license
part of the file.

Cheers,

Wayne

> 
> Cheers,
> 
> Javier
> 
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