[openlp-dev] Relicensing as GPLv3+

Bastian Germann bastiangermann at fishpost.de
Wed Oct 10 07:39:50 EDT 2018


Dear OpenLP Developers,

I am currently evaluating OpenLP and found issues that I filed as bug
reports #1795876 [0] and #1796506. I would not use OpenLP in production
with these not being resolved.

#1795876 shows OpenLP with its GPLv2 only license to be violating the
licenses of PyQt5 (GPLv3), requests (Apache 2.0), and possibly current
OpenOffice/LibreOffice versions. This is a long-standing issue that
applies for all versions that use PyQt. The license violations can be
healed by relicensing OpenLP.

Relicensing means some dependencies cannot be used anymore because they
are (L)GPLv2 only, which can be resolved by replacing them (pyxdg; done
in a merge request) or relicensing them as well (pysword). I guess as
pysword's maintainer Thomas Groth is also an OpenLP developer this will
work out well.

There are essentially three different licenses that would be okay:
GPLv2+, GPLv3, and GPLv3+. However, nobody would be able to use OpenLP
under GPLv2, so GPLv2+ would hide the actual license.

I would suggest using GPLv3+ over GPLv3 only because if you sometime
want to use a GPLv4 licensed program, you would have to relicense again.
That is why the FSF suggests using the "or later" clause.

I bring this issue up here because Raoul wanted to have it discussed on
the mailing list. You should ask every copyright holder to agree to a
GPLv3+ license change and document their approval publicly (the best
place would be the bug report). If anyone disagrees, his or her code
would have to be removed. Fortunately you track all contributors. I
guess a good time for changing the code if the approvals account for
~90% of the code.

There is also an unrelated MIT license violation described in the issue.
You should think of defining a license check process for new
dependencies and files on https://wiki.openlp.org/Development:Workflow
to prevent future license violations.

Thanks for all the work you put in OpenLP.

Regards,
Bastian

[0]: https://bugs.launchpad.net/openlp/+bug/1795876


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