License collision?

[rudyryk]

As I see this project is using Unidecode lib, which is GPL-licensed. Is it ok?

I'm currently looking for solution licensed under MIT/ BSD / Apache.

[davedash]

IANAL, and maybe someone from Mozilla Legal can weigh in on this. It seems to be a grey area of GPL since this is not statically linked (I'm not including the source code of unidecode in this module). I am however writing a library that's made to work with that library.

It seems there are three prevailing beliefs.

1. That this is okay.
2. That I should dual license this as both MIT and GPL.

Unfortunately I'm not sure what to do here. I will assign this to someone at the Mozilla Corporation with the hoes that they can ask someone in Legal.

Thanks for bringing this up.

[davedash]

@ianb I assigned to you ;)

Note: that even if option 1 is true, @rudyryk your code will have dependencies (via this) on GPL licensed software.

[ergo]

I'm quite sure that the dependency on unidecode makes this library also GPL - but at same time its not distributed - so I'm a bit confused here.

Would be good to hear from someone from legal department.

[ergo]

Also - would changing to https://github.com/kmike/text-unidecode solve this issue completly?

[rudyryk]

@ergo I've tried to use text-unidecode, but it didn't produce expected results in some cases. I've finally ended up with pytils.translit as I only needed Cyrillic support.

[ergo]

Ah, interesting I need a more general solution since I have no idea about users of the system. text-unidecode seems quite decent.