kicad-developers team mailing list archive

["Torsten Hüter" <torstenhtr@xxxxxx>]

Hi Wayne,
 

>> Is there somewhere an overview of the used libraries / 3rd party software and their licenses? (for instance an list, >LibreOffice table or similar)
>
>No.

Would it be helpful to create a table for the internal documentation? If yes, how should the table look like and what kind of format should be used?
 
>> The push and shove router is covered by the GPLv3+. This means the whole KiCad package has to be released under the terms of >>the GPLv3 license, if you're including the P&S-router.
>>
>>However, all of the license files in kicad say 2+.
>>
>> However, the "About../License" tab shows the following text:
>>
>> "The complete KiCad EDA Suite is released under the GNU General Public License (GPL) version 2 or any later version"
>>
>>I would think this would be adequate but I have not asked the FSF. Do
>>we actually have to do this or is the GPL2+ statement OK.

I'm not a lawyer but would say that it is a one-way road, you can't "downgrade" from GPL3+ to GPL2+ and
the whole package has to be distributed under the terms of the GPL3+ license. You can find on slashdot.org an interesting discussion about this subject:

http://ask.slashdot.org/story/07/06/16/1818241/gplv2-and-gplv3-coexisting-in-the-same-project

Perhaps it makes sense to ask an (license) expert too.

>Is it directly derived or is it a clean room implementation? It doesn't
>say anywhere that I could see that it is derived from the Hershey font.
>If it's a clean room implementation than we could ask if it can be
>re-licensed to be GPL compatible.

This is indeed a very good question. I've seen in the helpers/tools_to_build_newstroke-font/README.txt the following line:
font_draft1.lib - old draft glyph library with the metrics from Hersheys Simplex
So I'm guessing he has extended the Hershey font. Of course it could be that he has repainted all chars/symbols. Still then is the problem, that he has released the font under the terms of the CC-BY license.

Asking the original author is a very good idea. 

> This would push back the stable release. How do you suggest we package
> the fonts? Packaging them separately is going to be painful.

This is quite true, but only required if the font can't be relicensed to GPL. If the GPL is choosen, it would make sense to define a GPL font exception for the KiCAD suite - so that the font can be embedded into the user design without affecting the design license.

If the author does not agree, it could be necessary to seperate the font from the program. The "newstroke" font is contained in a header (helpers/tools_to_build_newstroke-font/newstroke_font.h). This is an array of strings, the format is relative simple - one way could be a reader, that parses this header at runtime - or put the strings into a separate file and parse them there.

> I like what the geda folks did. They basically give you permission to
> modify the symbols for use in your designs but enforced the GPL if you
> are going to provide libraries of files derived from the symbols. We
> should make a similar statement about our libraries since they are GPL
> licensed if no one objects.

Sounds like a good plan! 
It would be important to define a policy as well; any contributor has to agree with the terms of this license. 
I don't know if that's true for all parts of the library - last time I've seen some contributions with a different licenses.

Thanks,
Torsten