Hi all,
I'm posting here today hoping that we can finally resolve some licensing issues which recently emerged regarding the Scour extension for Inkscape (also know as 'Optimized SVG' output).
I'll try to summarize the issue as good as possible so everybody is up to speed:
* Right now we bundle an old version of Scour that is dual-licensed with Apache 2.0 license and GPLv2+. This dual licensing was only introduced in a very recent commit [1] when the original author Jeff Schiller agreed to re-license his code under the terms of GPLv2+ after license issues in Inkscape were brought up in a previous discussion [2]. However at this point there were multiple contributions to the Scour codebase by other authors who did not accept to re-license their contributions. This is why the re-licensing is likely to be void and the the current maintainer of Scour (Tobias Oberstein) decided not to apply the dual-licensing when switching over to GitHub with the project [3]. * I recently updated the Scour extension for Inkscape and want to merge these changes [4]. Obviously I followed Tobias Obersteins decision not to apply the dual-licensing, so the new version only has the Apache 2.0 License. * The open question now is: Can we bundle the Scour code with Inkscape and how to we do it?
In my opinion this should not be a problem since Scour is an external module that is *indepentent* from Inkscape, e.g. license incompatibilities do not play a role here which is also the opinion of Tobias Oberstein (see [5] for details and references). Also most project members seem to agree (see comments in the merge request [4])
However If we don't want to follow this reasoning we have to decide on alternatives (especially since the code currently in trunk might well have an invalid license).
I hope we can once and for all resolve this issue!
Best Regards, Eduard
[1] http://bazaar.launchpad.net/~scouring/scour/trunk/revision/222 [2] https://sourceforge.net/p/inkscape/mailman/message/32342425/ [3] https://github.com/codedread/scour [4] https://code.launchpad.net/~eduard-braun2/inkscape/scour/+merge/278387 [5] https://github.com/codedread/scour/issues/7