GPL vs Artistic1 warning on Perl projects

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schwern

about 1 year ago

I just noticed that DBI has the warning, "Artistic License may conflict with GPL" http://www.ohloh.net/projects/3583/factoids/353356

While this is true, it is irrelevant for Perl licensed projects (dual GPL/Aristic1) as you can choose either one. It's discussed here under "License of Perl 5 and below". http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html

Could you add an exception so the Artistic1 vs GPL incompatibility warning is not displayed if the other license is GPL? I'm worried the warning will be misinterpreted to mean the project is incompatible with the GPL.

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Max Horn

about 1 month ago

I would also be interested for such a feature in ScummVM, which is in a similar situation. Moodle is also in this situation, see https://www.ohloh.net/forums/10/topics/359

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schwern

about 1 month ago

For some reason certain Artistic + GPL projects have this warning (DBI) and some do not (Test::More). GNU is quite clear that there's no conflict in the Perl license because its Artistic OR GPL rather than Artistic AND GPL.

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Robin Luckey

about 1 month ago

The GPL conflict warnings have been a perennial source of problems: it seems that there are an endless supply of cases in which our detection logic is fooled.

We don't have the development resources to really solve these issues once and for all, and as a result there are too many false positives. It reflects poorly on projects, and poorly on Ohloh.

So we've decided to simply stop attaching these GPL conflict warnings to projects.

We'll continue to scan source code for license citations, and we'll continue to list the licenses we found in the project analyses. However, we'll no longer raise a warning flag if one of the licenses we found may conflict with GPL.

The warnings are currently still visible. However, as each project is refreshed by our analysis engine, the warnings will disappear. It will take about a week to update every project.

Thanks, Robin

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schwern

about 1 month ago

One simple way out for the vast majority of cases is to define a "Perl license (Artistic or GPLv2)" in the choices. This would allow Perl projects which are licensed "same as Perl" to properly express that rather than as an ambiguous mixing of two licenses.

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