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LGPL violations abound here #26

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durin42 opened this issue Jul 8, 2024 · 9 comments
Closed

LGPL violations abound here #26

durin42 opened this issue Jul 8, 2024 · 9 comments
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@durin42
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durin42 commented Jul 8, 2024

You can't relicense a codebase from LGPL (which is what nose was) to MIT. I took a look at some code I remember writing back in ~2009 and it's definitely the code I wrote back then, unmodified. What you're doing here is a huge copyright violation (I'm not even one of the major contributors to nose) and you should stop.

(Arguably MIT codebases can have LGPL dependencies, but you can't wholesale copy even single functions from an LGPL project into an MIT one, much less the entire project.)

@durin42
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durin42 commented Jul 8, 2024

You might have some interest in nose2 (which may not have been finished?), which was under the BSD license and therefore usable in environments which require more permissive license terms.

@mdmintz mdmintz added the duplicate This issue or pull request already exists label Jul 8, 2024
@mdmintz
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mdmintz commented Jul 8, 2024

Duplicate of #16

@MostAwesomeDude
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Since @durin42 appears to be this Nose author, I'm considering this a genuine case of improper relicensing, and I've started the process to fix the license in nixpkgs.

@mdmintz
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mdmintz commented Jul 8, 2024

These are the official nose maintainers according to https://pypi.org/project/nose/

Screenshot 2024-07-08 at 12 56 32 PM

And this is the official nose author:

Screenshot 2024-07-08 at 1 00 16 PM

@thesamesam
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an author, not the author.

@durin42
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durin42 commented Jul 8, 2024

Yes, JP and Kumar are both former colleagues of mine from about 15 years ago.

But you'd need consent of all former contributors to relicense, and I can state with authority nobody contacted me about such an effort.

@mdmintz
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mdmintz commented Jul 8, 2024

Waiting to hear from the official nose people:


These are the official nose maintainers according to https://pypi.org/project/nose/

Screenshot 2024-07-08 at 12 56 32 PM

And this is the official nose author:

Screenshot 2024-07-08 at 1 00 16 PM

I would like to hear first what any of these 3 people have to say. Then we can resolve this.

@MostAwesomeDude
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Update: nixpkgs will drop pynose entirely "due to licensing issues"; see NixOS/nixpkgs#325669.

@mauke
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mauke commented Jul 9, 2024

I would like to hear first what any of these 3 people have to say. Then we can resolve this.

That's neither necessary nor sufficient. To relicense code, you need agreement¹ from all copyright holders of that code. It doesn't matter who the "official maintainers" currently are. This is not a project governance issue; it is about copyright law.


¹ By "agreement" I mean explicit approval, not just the absence of disapproval. You can't just say "well, nobody objected so it's all right, probably."

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