[Pkg-crosswire-devel] SWORD licence is GPL v2 only

[Jonathan Marsden]

Peter von Kaehne wrote:

> Jonathan Marsden wrote:

>> and currently our packages claim that everything in the source
>> tarball is GPL V2 or later.

> If this is so, then this would be wrong. SWORD is GPL2 and not "or later"

Confirmed.  debian/copyright in our sword-1.5.11-1 packages currently
says (in part):

Files: *
Copyright: Copyright 1996-2009 CrossWire Bible Society
License: GPL-2+

and that plus sign means "any later version".  The SWORD code does not
use "or any later version" language.  The debian/copyright file for
1.5.8-8 (from 2005) has the "any later version" in it, so this mistake
has been there since well before the current packaging team existed.

Good catch.  That is simple enough to fix (just remove that plus sign!).

Omitting all the convenience copies of libraries (and then making sure
everything builds and works with the relevant external libraries
instead) is likely to be rather more work.  I've begun doing this for zlib.

Jonathan