# from Bryce Harrington # on Sunday 14 May 2006 11:24 am:
On Sun, May 14, 2006 at 08:17:23AM -0500, Aaron Spike wrote:
Can we and should we place the PD files under the GPL?
This seems like a logical approach. I don't know of a particular reason why PD would be preferred for inkscape code. Perhaps putting those PD files under LGPL+GPL would address any possible needs for future use in being linked with non-GPL'd code.
IMO, you shouldn't have anything labeled PD in your codebase. That's asking for trouble. You can mark it as "derived from PD" with a link/reference to the original, but better slap a GPL license on it before checking-in to prevent anyone from inadvertently breaking the GPL.
LGPL files are going to cause the same trouble as PD files. You can't take GPL code and put it in an LGPL file without consent of the copyright holder(s). Thus, while GPL may not be viral in the usage sense, refactoring is going to cause it to be viral if you're restructuring a mixed codebase and not paying *very* close attention to the notice at the top of each file. If you really want to have LGPL portions (and the current attribution/history guarantees that this is legal), I strongly recommend a separate repository (and/or pre-commit hook to enforce this (though that's a tricky open-ended-text-search problem in itself.)) Given that a revision is immutable, any inadvertent checkin puts the committer in perpetual violation until you "svnadmin dump" and scrub the repo (and I think I'm being generous here -- a lawyer might not be so nice as to let you off the hook at that.)
--Eric