[SOLVED] Still license issues with SOFA plugins

[kislinsk]

I noticed that there was a pull request targeting license stuff not long ago (v16.12), which is nice, but I still found some delicate license issues, which potentially can cause trouble for users of SOFA and the SOFA-devs. Just from a first look into the plugin folder for all plugins, that do NOT contain the string “LGPL”, I found conflicting license information. I didn’t yet check the “LGPL”-plugins or SOFA in general for potential transitive license issues (conflicting with licenses of third-party dependencies). It’s also hard to make a pull request for this issues as it is something that the SOFA devs have to decide.

1. BulletCollisionDetection
– getModuleLicence() returns “Private”
– text file with information “LICENCE: Private”
– initBulletCollisionDetection.cpp has LGPL 2.1 header
– other source files don’t have a license header
– depends on BulletPhysics, which is licensed under zlib (with exceptions!)

2. ExternalBehaviorModel
– getModuleLicence() returns “???”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

3. Haption
– getModuleLicence() not defined
– text file with information “LICENCE: None”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

4. ManifoldTopologies
– getModuleLicence() returns “?”
– text file with information “LICENCE: ??”

5. OpenCTMPlugin
– getModuleLicence() returns “Licence ZLIB”
– text file with information “LICENCE: OpenCTM library is an Open source, with a very liberal license (zlib/libpng license).”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

6. Registration
– getModuleLicence() returns “QPL”
– has a file LICENCE.txt (should be LICENSE.txt), which states QPL
– Source files have LGPL 2.1 header

7. SofaHAPI
– getModuleLicence() returns “GPL”
– text file with information “LICENCE: GPL”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

8. SofaPML
– getModuleLicence() returns empty string
– no text file with license information
– source files have both (!) LGPL 2.1 and GPL 2 headers each

General notes:
– I would expect that every plugin provides a getModuleLicense() function and that this function returns a non-empty string with a valid license
– I would expect getModuleLicense() to return the license version as well if it applies (e.g. LGPL, GPL)
– I would expect getModuleLicense() to follow a common scheme, e.g., the official license title like “zlib” instead of “License ZLIB”
– Search/replace “licence/Licence/LICENCE” to “license/License/LICENSE” would help searching for license information (including filenames and file contents)

[Guillaume]

Hi Stefan,

First please notice that the SOFA dev mailing list has changed.
To subscribe: https://sympa.inria.fr/sympa/subscribe/sofa-dev

There is indeed some mess in SOFA licenses. I created a pull request to clean all this a few days ago: https://github.com/sofa-framework/sofa/pull/139
Thank you for your notes, I could indeed improve my work by cleaning getModuleLicense functions for examples. The question of transitive licenses is also important.

Could you please paste and update your topic in the pull request?
It would be better to continue this discussion there.

Best,
Guillaume.

[kislinsk]

Sure, thank you!

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