Re: Licensing issue with cvs2svn

Daniel Berlin wrote:
> On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 10:21 AM, Michael Haggerty <[email protected]> wrote:
>> I'm the main maintainer of cvs2svn, which is under a CollabNet license.
>>
>> Greg Ward has been working on cvs2hg, a variation of cvs2svn that
>> converts directly to Mercurial.  For this work, he would like to "import
>> mercurial" from cvs2svn code (it is Python) and push the output to
>> Mercurial via its API.
>>
>> The problem is that Mercurial is GPLv2, and it is not clear to me that
>> the CollabNet license is compatible with GPLv2; it seems likely that it
>> is not.  Therefore it is at best questionable whether linking cvs2svn
>> and Mercurial is permitted [1].
> 
> As long as mercurial is separately distributed from cvs2hg and it is
> the user who is "linking", it doesn't really matter.

IANAL but it seems to me that writing code that imports a Python library
is analogous to writing C code against a GPLed dynamically-linked
library.  The latter is very much a gray zone; the FSF claims that it is
not allowed under GPL, whereas others think that it is.

I guess I will ask the Mercurial copyright holder if he has any objections.

It might nevertheless be advantageous to move cvs2svn to a better-known
open-source license in the hands of the Subversion Foundation, by
analogy with the Subversion project itself.  But if this GPL thing is
indeed a non-issue, then such a change loses most of its urgency.

Thanks,
Michael

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gpl#Linking_and_derived_works

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