Mismatched licenses

[patrickplynch]

Hello all,

As per the license file the code is licensed as LGPL-3.0. However in multiple different files there are GPL license references. Is this a carryover from this issue #12? Or is this library actually GPL? Thanks for your time!

Locations of GPL referencing:

In the setup.py file at lines:

• 3-14:

  Robot-Framework-FTP-Library/setup.py

  Lines 1 to 14 in 5016947

  	#Robot Framework FTP Library
  	#
  	#This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
  	#it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  	#the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
  	#any later version.
  	#
  	#This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  	#but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  	#MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
  	#GNU General Public License for more details.
  	#
  	#You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  	#along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

• 30:

  Robot-Framework-FTP-Library/setup.py

  Line 30 in 5016947

  license='GPLv3',

In the FtpLibrary.py file at lines:

• 3-14:

  Robot-Framework-FTP-Library/FtpLibrary.py

  Lines 3 to 14 in 5016947

  	#This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify
  	#it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
  	#the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or
  	#any later version.
  	#
  	#This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful,
  	#but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of
  	#MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the
  	#GNU General Public License for more details.
  	#
  	#You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License
  	#along with this program. If not, see <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/>.

[kowalpy]

Good catch @patrickplynch . I guess file comments should be updated so that all points to LGPL. This library is LGPL.

[patrickplynch]

Hey @kowalpy no problem, and that's good to hear! I was worried that this was actually intended to be licensed under GPL.

[MrMino]

I'm not a lawyer, and I hope I'm wrong, but...

I'm not sure if you can change the license like that. You don't own the right to relicense the work of other contributors - they still hold the copyright to their work.

The common understanding and the GitHub ToS is that the contributions are licensed under the license from the notice present in the repository at the time of the contribution. This is normally called inbound=oundbound norm.

Whenever you make a contribution to a repository containing notice of a license, you license your contribution under the same terms, and you agree that you have the right to license your contribution under those terms. If you have a separate agreement to license your contributions under different terms, such as a contributor license agreement, that agreement will supersede.

I believe this means that all contributions of persons other than @kowalpy made before 24753e7 are still GPLv3.

I base this belief on the fact that if the license in a project could be changed this way, the strong copyleft guarantees of GPL licenses could be easily circumvented by a new maintainer just changing the license to MIT.

I'm not sure about the notices in the individual files, but to my understanding they superseede the license notice from the repostory, so all of the contributions to the files with GPLv3 notices are still, in fact, under GPLv3