Odoo Addons (MOVED TO GITHUB)

[6.1] Incompatible MPL license in wiki module

Bug #1049301 reported by Alec Leamas
8
This bug affects 1 person
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Odoo Addons (MOVED TO GITHUB)
Fix Released
Low
OpenERP's Framework R&D
Odoo Addons (MOVED TO GITHUB) 6.1
openerp (Fedora)
New
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

In the wiki module, the files web/controllers/wiki.py and web/widgets/wiki.py are distributed under MPL (Mozilla Public License) conditions. Other files in the same module are distributed under GPLv3 + and BSD.

Legally, this doesnt work IMHO - MPL is not compatible with GPL, so the only way to distribute the module would be to split it into two independent parts, one with the MPL files and one with the others. To me, this doesn't make sense.

OTOH, both of the MPL files seems to be copyrighted by openerp (i. e., Tiny ERP) so if we just got a message here saying that openerp intends to relicense these files under the same GPLv3+ conditions as other parts of the product, there is no problem.

So: Does openerp intend to relicense web/controllers/wiki.py and web/widgets/wiki.py under GPLv3+?

Related branches

lp:openobject-addons/6.1
Revision history for this message
Alec Leamas (leamas-alec) wrote :

Just to clarify: As I understand the situation, noone can distribute this module legally in one piece The possible exception is Openerp,SA which holds the copyright and is unlikely to sue itself. See e. g., http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main, note that this is in no way Fedora specific.

Revision history for this message
Olivier Dony (Odoo) (odo-openerp) wrote :

Hello Alec,

The confusion comes from the fact that these files (all located in the `web` subdirectory of the `wiki` module) were originally intended to be part of the OpenERP 6.0 web client, which was licensed under the OpenERP Public License (based on MPL v1.1).

Now your question has different answers depending on which OpenERP version you are considering:

* For OpenERP 6.0: as the files have been moved in the server-side components of OpenERP 6.0 we should indeed re-license them under a compatible license. The license boilerplate should be modified to reflect this.

* For OpenERP 6.1: these files are obsolete (the web layer was completely rewritten), so we should simply delete this `web` subdirectory of the wiki module - I think this was overlooked.

* For OpenERP 7.0 (current trunk): the files have already been deleted.

Does that seem to address your issue? If yes, we'll update the source tree accordingly.

Thanks for reporting this licensing inconsistency!

Changed in openobject-addons:
assignee: nobody → OpenERP's Framework R&D (openerp-dev-framework)
importance: Undecided → Low
status: New → In Progress
Revision history for this message
Alec Leamas (leamas-alec) wrote :

Thanks for reply!

I have no interest in 6.0, so this as well as 7.0 needs no attention IMHO.

As for 6.1, if the files could be removed without affecting functionality, this is of course the proper action and it would solve my problem (which is a need to package them in a separate package - no joy...)

Packaging is a strange business - you stumble into a certain kind of problems :)

Revision history for this message
Olivier Dony (Odoo) (odo-openerp) wrote :

Thanks for your quick answer! The obsolete files were removed from the 6.1 source tree of the openobject-addons project at rev.7030 (rev-id: <email address hidden>)

summary: - Incompatible MPL license in wiki module
+ [6.1] Incompatible MPL license in wiki module
Changed in openobject-addons:
milestone: none → 6.1
status: In Progress → Fix Released
Revision history for this message
Olivier Dony (Odoo) (odo-openerp) wrote :

Alec, I'm not too sure about the policy for the downstream Fedora bug, will you update its status yourself?

Revision history for this message
Alec Leamas (leamas-alec) wrote :

Yes, I will. Thanks for help! Will update update it when closing downstream - this might take a while, I'm batching some other fixes before releasing a new fedora package. I'll make a note here when I'm done.

Once again, thanks for good response!

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