Last modified: 2012-05-21 19:40:04 UTC
Hi, I am the maintainer of the mediawiki package for Fedora EPEL project. While putting together the package for 1.19 it was found that the license to maintenance/cssjanus is ASL 2.0 and the license for mediawiki is GPL+2.0. The GPL 2. and ASL 2. are not "compatible" to the FSF so I am trying to work out my options and to find out what the mediawiki's projects rationale for bundling the two items together. 1) cssjanus has a GPL exception to its ASL license that mediawiki knows of. 2) we need to look at mediawiki being used as GPL 3.0 even though it is not explicitely licensed that way. Thanks for any clarifications I can get.
Moved discussion to wikitech-l -- please follow-up there. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/61197 Leaving the bug itself open until this is resolved.
I'll consult with our counsel on this.
Here's what we're thinking on this subject. Our code is "GPLv2 or later," allowing licensees to comply with either GPL v2 or v3. So someone who wants to distribute the code (like Fedora) can comply by conforming to the terms of the Apache-compatible GPL v3. This means we don't have to explicitly move to GPL v3 only. Alternately, anyone who wants to comply only with GPL v2 can retain the option of excising the ASL code. We should explore the possibility of explicitly moving to the GPLv3 (or later) as a means of creating a little less confusing situation, but I hope this explanation works for you, Stephen.
The fedora upstream bug was https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=820452 The following items were clarified in by Tom Callaway and Kevin Fenzi. 1) cssjanus is included but not "depended on" which means it doesn't end up in the ASL2.0 <=> GPL2 problem I was worried about. 2) Creative Commons has given Fedora the right to include its logos in our package. The Trademarks are licensed that express permission is needed to distribute them. 3) Jonathan Snook and Robert Nyman have given us permission to distribute wikibits.js under CC-BY-SA 2.5. With that my parts of this ticket are resolved.
(In reply to comment #3) > Here's what we're thinking on this subject. Our code is "GPLv2 or later," > allowing licensees to comply with either GPL v2 or v3. So someone who wants to > distribute the code (like Fedora) can comply by conforming to the terms of the > Apache-compatible GPL v3. This means we don't have to explicitly move to GPL > v3 only. Alternately, anyone who wants to comply only with GPL v2 can retain > the option of excising the ASL code. As I responded elsewhere, to be fair to our reusers, MediaWiki shouldn't really be advertising its GPLv2 compatibility anywhere without an asterisk so long as cssjanus is included. e.g. "MediaWiki is free software licensed under version 2 of the GNU General Public License" at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Download.
A common way that this sort of thing is handled is that things like CSSJanus are only enabled by configuration, and the documentation for that configuration indicates the licensing situation. For example, $wgUseCSSJanus or something similar could be false by default. FreeType has had similar issues because of the patents surrounding font rendering. In their case it was a compiler switch that you could flip which would include code that introduced different licensing situations.
