The licence in the pysvg ebuild states the package is "BSD" licensed, but the licence in $sitedir/pysvg/pysvg.py contradicts this. The intent appears to be only to be of BSD-type when used non-commercially. The source file states the copyright holders definition of commercial, which sadly seems to include me :( I can't find any similar licence in the licenses/ directory, so can't suggest an already existing licence to switch to. It definitely isn't the old "as-is" fall back though, because of the commercial restriction. Thanks, James Reproducible: Always
In the meantime, I added a warning to pkg_postinst().
Homepage currently says license is GPL-3 which covers the non-commercial part AIUI. Updated ebuild, closing as fixed.
That is very different interpretation to how I read the license update on the homepage. It still sets a barrier for "any usage of pySVG in a company". If anything the latest license change looks a lot more like the value of LICENSE in the ebuild should be 'free-noncomm'. No idea how the change on the homepage applies to the current source tarball, as it includes practically no usable licensing information. The only information I can really see in the tarball is from setup.py that contains the 'License :: Free for non-commercial use' PyPI classifier, and there are no GPL references.
I am running this past our legal team. I looked into this a bit and the author is using "GPLv3 or later" for open source usage. Now, the author also appears to have some sort of commercial usage terms. These commercial terms are, in my opinion, incompatible with the GPLv3. Also, note on the Google Code page it notes GPLv3, and in the code itself we see this http://code.google.com/p/pysvg/source/browse/trunk/pySVG/conf/license.txt I am more than fairly certain that the GPLv3 will not allow for the additional restrictions on the end users freedom to do as they wish with the code. We will see what legal returns with. djc, we may want to reopen this if legal returns with any surprises.
Matt, thanks for running it past legal, feel free to re-open as appropriate.
Reopening and adding the licenses team. IANAL but my opinion and understand of the GPLv3 is that it supersedes the additional clauses that the upstream author has tried to add. Section 7 of the GPLv3 covers additional terms. There are only 6 classes of restriction that can be added, and non-commercial use is NOT amongst those. Ergo, the upstream author's non-commercial use restriction is considered as "further restrictions", and is not binding per section 7 paragraph 4.
GPLv3 doesn't allow commercial restriction (v2 didn't either). But since the author of PySVG put this restriction as a means of telling when one license and when the other applies, I suppose he's a bit confused about how dual-licensing works. I think the better option for him would be to choose AGPLv3 which is even more restrictive and would therefore produce more potential clients for a commercial licence, while at the same time be compliant with both FSF and OSI definitions of F/OSS. If no-one has anything against it, I could contact him and tell him about this.
pysvg-0.2.1 switched to a BSD license, and has been in the tree.
