Debian and GPL again

[jriegel]

Hi guys,
Debian reopened the bug concerning FreeCAD:

http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=617613

IMO its mostly a outdated license collection of the debian package, but in browsing the file I found one of Werners script with GPL:
master\src\Mod\Part\MakeBottle.py

And the dfxLib in Draft is also GPL:
master\src\Mod\Draft\draftlibs\*

I think Werner can change the license, but whats about the dfx lib? Is there a change the authors relicense?

Debian sounds like the use the same rule on python scripts in the package, that would again drop us from Debian!

[wmayer]

The never ending story. It's like SCO vs. IBM

I had a look at the complaints:

Files: src/Mod/Draft/*

This is all LGPL now. However, there are a few files with non-proper license text.
* importDWG.py: says "Lesser General Public License (GPL)". It should be "Lesser General Public License (LGPL)"
* importDXF.py: the same
* importOCA.py is under GPL

Files: src/Mod/Draft/draftlibs/dxf*

This is indeed under GPL and might be problematic

Files: src/Mod/Draft/importAirfoilDAT.py

This is now LGPL. So, it's fixed.

Files: src/Mod/Sketcher/App/sketchflat/* (these files are GPL-3+)

No longer part of FreeCAD. So, it's fixed.

Files: src/Mod/Part/MakeBottle.py

Should be re-licenced under LGPL. I'll do that...

src/Tools/*

These are all helper scripts which _can_ be under GPL. However, in the past we decided to move to LGPL just to avoid any confusion. There are a few files with GPL or no license. This should be fixed:
* examplePy2Wiki.py (GPL)
* fcbt.py (no license)
* FCFileTools.py (no license)
* generate.py (GPL)
* MakeAppTools.py (no license)
* dir2qrc.py (GPL)
* DistTools.py (no license)

[yorik]

Ok I fixed the Draft files.

For the dxf importer files, I'm afraid that is not possible, since they were made by many different people from the blender community over time. There is probably no way to contact them all now, and since those files are used in other projects, there is little chance the license can be changed. But we might do like for other problematic files, not include them into the source code, and download them on first run... It wouldn't be much work, and would even clean a bit the Draft module... Only it will require an internet connection the first time the user wants to use the dxf importer, which is annoying.

But that might also be a further motivation for someone to make a better DXF importer!

[jriegel]

Then I fear you have to strip it out
I think its at the moment more important to have the 0.14 GPL free with no grey area. Otherwise we never make it into Debian (or the others)....

@ Werner & Yorik
Also sometimes someone has to look on PySide instead of PyQt. Its also a GPL leftover.
PySide will be not an ease ride since Werners tunnel code and the pivy bindings.

[yorik]

Ok, I'll remove the dxf stuff then, put it on my github account or something, and setup the mechanism to download them at first use.

For pyside, it might be a good opportunity to see/assess where it is needed inside the freecad C++ code (In python code itself it is easy to change). Maybe we don't need all of them? Maybe some of the convenience stuff that Werner has set up (calls that return a pyqt widget, etc...) are not much used and can be changed by another mechanism (search for widgets by name,...)

[jriegel]

Hopefully you're right Yorik. Since the Draft-module is one of the advanced examples of python usage in FreeCAD you and
Werner can try to do the migration.

Maybe we this year we have a new release before Christmas (bahh, I guess not..)

[yorik]

"It's done when it's done"

[jriegel]

You bet!

[wmayer]

Also sometimes someone has to look on PySide instead of PyQt. Its also a GPL leftover.
PySide will be not an ease ride since Werners tunnel code and the pivy bindings.

Mission accomplished! The PySide binding code is now integrated and works pretty well. However, I have deactivated it as long as the move to PySide (in Python) is not finished.

[jriegel]

Ey, that was placing fast Werner!