Re: Using libunrar in KArchive?

Alex Merry <[email protected]> Fri, 28 Mar 2014 19:45:07 +0000
Newsgroups gmane.comp.kde.licensing
Message-ID <[email protected]>
On 28/03/14 18:55, Ingo Kl=F6cker wrote:
> On Thursday 27 March 2014 13:51:48 David Faure wrote:
>> On Thursday 27 March 2014 12:36:52 Sune Vuorela wrote:
>>> On 2014-03-27, David Faure <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>> Do you think it would be possibly to make karchive optionally
>>>> depend on libunrar, for *extracting* rar files (with no support
>>>> for creating rar files)?
>>>>
>>>> The license for libunrar has limitations, but AFAICS only "do not
>>>> recreate the compression algorithm", so if we don't do that,
>>>> would it be a problem?
>>>
>>> It would be code that none of the big distributions would ship, so
>>> I'm not sure it would be that ... useful.
>>
>> OK. Since I will write this code anyway (a customer needs it), this
>> only leaves one question - is it ok to put it in karchive anyway?
> =

> What do you mean by "put it in karchive"? As the cited Fedora page says =

> the license is GPL-incompatible. You cannot link GPL code together with =

> any parts of unrar's source code. Calling the unrar executable from =

> karchive should be okay though.

I would assume this is putting the code that *uses* libunrar in
KArchive, which is fine.  Obviously, putting libunrar itself in would
not be.

But, as Albert said, no distribution would ship a binary that linked to
libunrar, so that bit of code wouldn't get much use (distros would just
compile KArchive without unrar support).

Alex