On Wed, Nov 26, 2008 at 7:00 AM, Lasse Laursen <gazoo@xxxxxxx
<mailto:gazoo@xxxxxxx>> wrote:
Now this is all well and good, but when looking closer - at least
one library that PyGame uses seem to be licensed under the regular
GPL - for example the smpeg lib from this location:
http://icculus.org/smpeg/
As you discovered yourself, smpeg is in fact publically distributed
under the LGPL. For reference, you can see the license that smpeg is
distributed with by downloading it or by looking at copyright file
with the source distribution, which is available on the web here:
http://svn.icculus.org/smpeg/trunk/COPYING?revision=2&view=markup
<http://svn.icculus.org/smpeg/trunk/COPYING?revision=2&view=markup>
I know that lawyers don't exactly troll programming mailing lists,
but even some general knowledge would do me good here... I would
assume that since the entire PyGame package has one license,
that's the one to keep an eye on... Which would be the easiest for
me without a doubt... All feedback welcome...
You are right to be concerned about the licensing terms of the
components of a package, regardless of what the licensing terms given
with entire package were. Getting a bunch of files as part of a larger
package does not guarantee that you actually have the right to
distribute all those files under the packages license (i.e. the
distributors of the package could be violating copyright of the
components, and your ignorance of their violations don't protect you
from being wrong if you perpetuate the problem).
However on the other hand, if you had looked up a components license
for some copy you are given outside a package, and it said "don't
distribute this ever!" that wouldn't necessarily mean you couldn't
legally distribute the copy of the component you got as part of a
package that does say it's licensed for you to distribute freely. The
reason why is one thing can be distributed under multiple licenses to
different people in different conditions. (i.e. maybe the package
distributor is licensed to redistribute the component under whatever
license they want, but the component is publically distributed with a
different license)
My point is, that it's really the specifics of how the content was
distributed by copyright holders and licensees that matter. Pygame's
LGPL license doesn't tell you anything about whether you actually have
rights to distribute components from other copyright holders, it just
means you have rights to distribute what the pygame copyright covers,
and you just have to trust the pygame people. In this case, however,
because you could get and distribute all of pygame's dependencies
under the LGPL from the copyright holders, you know you would be fine
to get all the dependencies and build yourself and distribute that.