[Vtigercrm-developers] vtiger crm licence and debian package

[Matthew Brichacek]

On Tue, 2006-01-31 at 13:42 -0800, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Finjon Kiang wrote:
> 
> >On 2/1/06, Fathi Boudra <fboudra at free.fr> wrote:
> >  
> >
> >>taken partly from Copyright.txt. It seems (for me) a bit incomprehensible.
> >>Some informations are false (feel free to correct me), which part of apache or
> >>mysql are in vtiger crm ? I'm not a lawyer but lawyer point of view is
> >>needed. Some clarity is requested on this subject, especially when you're
> >>looking vtiger crm story.
> >>
> >>cheers,
> >>
> >>Fathi
> >>    
> >>
> >
> >I got the same feeling with you. I'm not a lawyer, too. But I think
> >vtiger crm must be released under GPL. 
> >
> This is a real gray area with the GPL and interpreted languages.  The 
> GPL talks about making the source source available for a binary 
> distribution and it talks about compiling and linking.  Where does the 
> compilation take place?  At each location.  The PHP bytecode is not 
> being distributed.   Even the binary vtiger dist includes the .php 
> source files.
> 
Taken from the FSF License FAQ "Licenses NOT Compatible with the GPL"
section:

Mozilla Public License (MPL)
        
        This is a free software license which is not a strong copyleft;
        unlike the X11 license, it has some complex restrictions that
        make it incompatible with the GNU GPL. That is, a module covered
        by the GPL and a module covered by the MPL cannot legally be
        linked together. We urge you not to use the MPL for this reason.
        
        However, MPL 1.1 has a provision (section 13) that allows a
        program (or parts of it) to offer a choice of another license as
        well. If part of a program allows the GNU GPL as an alternate
        choice, or any other GPL-compatible license as an alternate
        choice, that part of the program has a GPL-compatible license.

Section 13 of the VPL:
13. MULTIPLE-LICENSED CODE.

      Initial Developer may designate portions of the Covered Code as
"Multiple-Licensed".  "Multiple-Licensed" means that the Initial
Developer permits you to utilize portions of the Covered Code under Your
choice of the SPL or the alternative licenses, if any, specified by the
Initial Developer in the file described in Exhibit A.This software is
Copyright vtiger  and Contributors. All rights reserved. This license
has been certified as open source.

We couldn't put the whole project under GPL even if all the current
developers agreed because we don't have any copyrights on the original
SPL code it was born from.  Rather, we would have to rip out any GPL
code since we don't have rights to change the underlying license.

Anyways, the version of the MPL that the SPL/VPL are based off of should
be fully compatible and allow mixing of code with different licenses.

IANAL and such :).


Matt