Possible license inconsistencies
hwo411 opened this issue · comments
Hello,
We were considering using your library as part of our application and discovered one potential license inconsistency:
Your library is licensed under MIT and has poppler-utils in the dependencies. However, poppler is licensed under GPL 2.
License information:
https://gitlab.freedesktop.org/poppler/poppler/-/blob/master/README.md
https://pkgs.alpinelinux.org/package/edge/main/x86/poppler-utils
In our understanding, it could make your library obligatory to be licensed under GPL 2. I'm not the license expert and I might be mistaken here. But I hope you find this observation helpful, and you might have already considered it, and there are reasons why it's still fine to use MIT. It'd be great if you can clarify it, and explain us the legal way to use your library and poppler in our app under MIT.
Thank you in advance!
Poppler is not distributed or modified as part of this library and you can choose to use it (or not) in combination. There is a good stack overflow response on this here: https://opensource.stackexchange.com/questions/4362/gpl-2-derivative-works See the part about separate programs communicating, which is the case here.
*Not a lawyer. :)
Thanks @mish15!
Assuming that you're right, and it's fine to license the library under MIT while using GPL2 item as a not mandatory dependency, I think it'd be nice to warn people that poppler is actually GPL2, and if you want to use it, you'll have to license your program under GPL2 too.
WDYT?
No worries @hwo411
I believe the same logic holds for anything modifying this library as it will also not distribute or modify poppler, but rather just communicate with it. The Linux kernel is GPL2 for example, usage does not automatically imply anything using it is a derivative work.