kicad-developers team mailing list archive

[Javier Serrano <javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Thu, Aug 27, 2015 at 5:03 PM, Nick Østergaard <oe.nick@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 2015-08-27 14:40 GMT+02:00 Javier Serrano <javier.serrano.pareja@xxxxxxxxx>:
>> Well done guys. The site looks amazing! I think this is also an
>> appropriate moment to thank the fine folks who maintained the
>> Confluence site all these years, especially Miguel.
>>
>> Regarding content, I just have a minor comment on the "About" part. I
>> think we should replace "The suite runs on Windows, Linux and OS X and
>> is licensed under GNU GPL v2." by "The suite runs on Windows, Linux
>> and OS X and is licensed under GNU GPL." As we have discussed in the
>> past, KiCad's code base is actually a mix of GPL2+ and GPL3+,
>> effectively behaving as a whole like GPL3+.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>
>> Javier
>
> Yeah, that is probably better, but it is still a bit ambiguous or not
> completely clear. I think we should consider it a task to get hold and
> make a file in the source describing the exact situation and
> preferable which folders and files are under which license. The about
> dialog in KiCad states GPLv2+. But we should probably make another new
> thread about this issue, instead of hijacking this announcement.
> (Which I have now done with this mail)
>
> Nick

This looks like a new thread to me now :)
I think we could take it in two phases. In a first phase, replacing
"GPL v2" or "GPLv2+" and similar wording by "GPL" in places like the
web site and the About dialog goes in the direction of at least not
saying anything which is false. In a second phase, I do agree with
you, and we should explore ways in which this can be communicated in a
standard way. There are two ways I know of at the moment, the
machine-readable Debian copyright file [1] and SPDX [2].

FWIW, my current understanding is that all of KiCad is GPL2+ except
for the P&S router, which is GPL3+.

Cheers,

Javier

[1] https://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
[2] https://spdx.org/