Sven Bartscher <[email protected]> writes: > Greetings, > > (Please excuse if the below analysis is partly or even completely wrong, > reading about licensing and copyright issues often makes me quite confused) > > I'm the maintainer of the package dwarf-fortress in non-free. The > package as a whole is clearly non-free as the license states that „you > may redistribute the *unmodified* binary and accompanying files“ and the > source code to the contained executable is not provided. > > The package also contains a shared library called libgraphics.so and the > corresponding source code. The library links to (among others) SDL and > GTK which are licensed under the LGPL-2.1, AIUI this means that > libgraphics.so and its source code have to licensed under the LGPL. (due > to condition 2, correct?)
As I understand it, libgraphics.so is not modifying SDL. In general, the LGPL only requires that you not get rid of the ability to dynamically link in a new version of SDL. So this is probably OK. > I could not find an explicit statement in the upstream tarball that > clarifies what license applies to the library in question. There is a > file called 'sdl license.txt' that contains a copy of the LGPL-2.1, > which hints that the author is aware that their work is in some way > affected by this license. > > As there are some problems[1] with the compiled shared library as > distributed by upstream (and because compiling things ourselves is > always nicer) I would like to rebuild the library when building the > Debian package, though I'm not sure if it is clear in the given > situation that it is legal to recompile the library and distribute the > resulting shared library. But maybe someone smarter than me can > enlighten me. I think you have to ask upstream about this (i.e. Tarn Adams). Absent any other information, I would think that you could not recompile the source into a new binary. It is probably just an oversight on the part of the Dwarf Fortress developers. I would phrase it as asking what license that part is under. There are a few obvious choices: LGPL 2.1 or later (to match SDL), MIT, or Apache. Please do not suggest a custom license. Cheers, Walter Landry
