Re: [fluid-dev] Bug#859793: fluidsynth: Package has infringed GPL

[Peter Hanappe]

Hello all,

I agree that the licenses in fluidsynth are not completely consisted and
Debian is right to make sure that they are.
However, it seems that chorus.c is now under the LGPL license. From
https://sourceforge.net/p/sox/code/ci/master/tree/COPYING:

  SoX source code is distributed under two main licenses. The two
  licenses are in the files LICENSE.GPL and LICENSE.LGPL. sox.c,
  and thus SoX-the user application, is distributed under the
  GPL, while the files that make up libsox are licensed under the
  less restrictive LGPL.

In the Makefile.am, you can see that chorus.c is part of libsox
(https://sourceforge.net/p/sox/code/ci/master/tree/src/Makefile.am).

I don't check the list of contributors to
fluidsynth_chorus.c. There was Markus Nentwig and me but surely
others, too. However, since fluidsynth was under LGPL
with "Copyright (C) 2003 Peter Hanappe and others" from the
beginning, I don't believe any contributors to
fluidsynth_chorus.c would object to putting their changes to that
file under the LGPL. I'll happily make my changes available under
that license.

So, because SoX/chorus.c is now under the LGPL and all the
changes that have been made between chorus.c and
fluidsynth_chorus.c fall under the LGPL, I believe that
fluidsynth_chorus.c can be put under the LGPL, too.

Cheers,
Peter



On 04/10/2017 12:38 PM, Javier Serrano Polo wrote:
> El dl 10 de 04 de 2017 a les 09:24 +0200, David Henningsson va escriure:
> > What makes things slightly easier for us as upstream is that FluidSynth
> > is released under LGPL rather than GPL. LGPL allows linking to custom
> > licenses.
> This is not the case because fluid_chorus.c is part of the library and
> must respect rights under LGPL.
>
> Rewriting fluid_chorus.c could be one first step. However, we could wait
> some time until Chris Bagwell tells us about the original source; Chris
> Bagwell or Peter Hanappe, it is not clear to me that fluid_chorus.c
> comes from SoX.