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Support #1581

Licensing terms in code conflict with GPL

Added by Jens Kraemer almost 4 years ago. Updated almost 4 years ago.

Status:
Resolved
Priority:
Normal
Assignee:
Emilio González Montaña
Category:
General
Target version:
-
Start date:
Due date:
% Done:

0%

Estimated time:
Milestones:

Description

Thanks for creating this plugin. I am currently investigating it because a customer of Planio wishes to use it with their account, and while I don't see any technical issues with it, there appears to be a legal issue.

The archive (0.4.0) I just downloaded has this in the ruby files' headers:

Copyright © Emilio González Montaña                                                                                                                                                      
Licence: Attribution & no derivates                                                                                                                                                      
  * Attribution to the plugin web page URL should be done if you want to use it.                                                                                                         
    https://redmine.ociotec.com/projects/localizable                                                                                                                                     
  * No derivates of this plugin (or partial) are allowed.                                                                                                                                
Take a look to licence.txt file at plugin root folder for further details.

First of all, the referenced licence.txt isn't there.

Second, and more importantly, since your plugin hooks into Redmine code by calling and extending Redmine code at runtime, and because Redmine itself is released under the GPL, your plugin is covered by the GPL as well, by definition.

Unfortunately, the license terms you state are in conflict with the GPL's requirements of freedom of use, change and redistribution in original and changed form. As I understand your 'no derivatives' clause, it forbids any changes to the code at all, wether they are being redistributed or not. Also, while I personally don't have a problem with a link to the Plugin author (as is the default in Redmine's Plugins page anyway), I am afraid that making this a requirement in the licensing terms is also not in the spirit of the GPL.

Since we would indeed need to make some minor changes to your plugin for use with Planio (most importantly, put all the patches in a common plugin-specific namespace to avoid naming conflicts in the global namespace) I would kindly ask you to re-release a version of the plugin under the GPL to clarify this situation. Also it would be really convenient if a public code repository would be available, ideally on Github so we can contribute our changes / fixes back as we usually do.

Thank you in advance :)

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