Re: Unrar package might contain proprietary code.

[John Darrington]

On Wed, Mar 01, 2017 at 08:59:37PM +0100, Cl??ment Lassieur wrote:
     I had a look at the source of the recently commited "unrar" package, and
     I could not find neither "copyright" lines nor pointers to the full
     notice, except in unrarlib.h and unrarlib.c, which belong to a different
     project.  IANAL, but according to GPLv2 and
     https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.en.html, those things are
     mandatory, COPYING is not enough.  So I think the "unrar" package
     contains proprietary code.

I think you are mistaken.

Yes,  the package does not explicitly have headers in the way that GNU 
recommends.
But I do not see how such a recommendation is "mandatory". (It's mandatory for
gnu programs, but there are many non-gnu programs in Guix)

The placement of COPYING  - whilst normally not all that we would like - is
part performance of an intent  to licence the software.

Like you say, the authors have taken GPL code from another project and 
incorporated
it into unrar - that is only possible if the the resultant work is GPL 
compatible.

Also if you look at the site where it is hosted https://gna.org/projects/unrar 
you
will see that it says: License: GNU General Public License V2 or later.


So, whilst it has been poorly executed, I believe there is ample evidence that 
this 
program is licenced GPL.

J'


-- 
Avoid eavesdropping.  Send strong encrypted email.
PGP Public key ID: 1024D/2DE827B3 
fingerprint = 8797 A26D 0854 2EAB 0285  A290 8A67 719C 2DE8 27B3
See http://sks-keyservers.net or any PGP keyserver for public key.

signature.asc
Description: Digital signature