2015-11-26 2:21 GMT-08:00 Tavmjong Bah <tavmjong@...47...>:

Hi,

Scour is now licensed solely under the Apache 2.0 license. This license in principle is not compatible with GPLv2.[1] Eduard Brown would like to merge an updated version of Scour into Inkscape trunk. He claims that as we are only calling Scour as an external program (script) we do not need to worry about the license incompatibility. Is this true?

Yes.

The main issue is whether Scour is a derivative work of Inkscape. If it's not, then the license incompatibility is not important, since the copyleft provisions of GPL do not kick in. Since Scour does not call any Inkscape code, it's not a derivative work. At most, it uses inkex.py, but that's GPL v2+, so we can simply relicense our copy of Scour as GPLv3.

By the way, while we are at the license issue, I noticed that almost all source files do not specify the GPL version, just "released under GNU GPL" - this means they're technically GPL v1+. Therefore we could change the license to GPL v2+. We have some GPLv3+ code imported from GIMP, so upgrading to GPLv2+ is actually pretty important.

Best regards, Krzysztof