License of distributed binaries, particularly flatpak

General Discussion
1

My question is particularly motivated by the question of what to do for the flatpak, but I guess it applies to the AppImage and Windows and Mac binaries too.

Since the release builds are done with -DBUILD_GPL_PLUGINS=ON and OpenBabel (GPL) is distributed with Avogadro as an essential component, I’m pretty sure that means the flatpak and the various binaries should be GPL-licensed themselves, even though the Avogadro code itself is BSD?

Maybe some subtle updates to the “About Avogadro” window would be appropriate (listing the licenses for the program, the Avogadro code, and for Open Babel), but primarily this is just about making sure the correct license is provided in the flatpak’s metadata

2

Licensing is a wonderful world, but yes the binaries are distributed as a mix of BSD and GPL v2 code at present.

3

The inclusion of the GPLv2 components means the whole must be licensed under GPLv2, is my understanding…

4

There’s a difference between directly using GPLv2 code and bundling a separate binary, but that’s a whole separate discussion.

Generally people prefer binaries to include licenses for all relevant pieces.

5

Sure, but in this case it is being provided as part of a bundle, while the binaries remain separate, as in the binaries on GitHub. The situation is analogous to the AppImage really. So should we be declaring the license of the flatpak as
BSD-3-Clause
or
BSD-3-Clause AND GPL-2.0-only
?

I’m not trying to start a discussion as much as get a judgement call from you as project lead :slight_smile:

In the flatpak-builder docs you can see that the flatpak manifest can include an appdata-license field with the description

Replace the appdata (metainfo) project_license field with this string. This is useful as the upstream license is typically only about the application itself, whereas the bundled app can contain other licenses too.

which is what made me wonder about this. If it’s been discussed and settled in the past, apologies.

6

Yes, it should say BSD-3-Clause AND GPL-2.0-only because that’s the accurate description of the bundle.

And yes, that’s why “the bundled app can contain other licenses too” text is there :slightly_smiling_face:

1 Like
7

This topic was automatically closed 3 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.