Pageear/Curlypage GPL violation

See also: #235842: d.o license conflicts

This is a rather blatant violation as well, as the user has linked to a third party license.

Here's a copy of it

The offered software is property of Christian Harz, webpicasso media.

The software is Freeware and may be used on private and commercial web pages free of charge, as long as you agree to the following license:

- The copyright may not be changed. The copyright only belongs to Christian Harz, webpicass media.

- It is not allowed to use the software on pages with illegal, pornography or ethicalally doubtful contents.

- Advertising link / Backlinks to webpicasso media, so far available, may not be removed.

- The software may not be sold (e.g. Ebay) or make money in any way, also not as part of another software or a script packages without reference to these license agreements and the copyright.

- It is not allowed to use pageear or parts of it in own public scripts / projects without author agreement.

- On commercial pages set a backlink to webpicasso media.

- webpicasso media is not responsible for damage and legal consequences, which can result from the use of the software.

I believe the following points conflict with the GPL:

1. - It is not allowed to use the software on pages with illegal, pornography or ethicalally doubtful contents.
2. - Advertising link / Backlinks to webpicasso media, so far available, may not be removed.
3. - It is not allowed to use pageear or parts of it in own public scripts / projects without author agreement.
4. - On commercial pages set a backlink to webpicasso media.

Some of the other points are probably not conflicting, or may be partial conflicts, but the above appear to be enough to say that project should be blocked/unpublished, removed in some way.

See http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html for examples of incompatibility due to advertising clauses.

I've contacted the maintainer.

The project page has this note : This module is going to be deprecated in favor of curlypage in respect of name copyright.

Is any other action going to be taken, or is this a 'wont fix' ???

It does appear there is non-GPL code included in the new curlypage module:
http://drupalcode.org/viewvc/drupal/contributions/modules/curlypage/curl...

What should we do with the deprecated module?
Shall we remove the code from CVS, or shall we just mark the releases as unsupported (if they are not already marked so)?

If I understand well, the releases should be marked as unsupported; I am not sure if the first option I listed is considered, in such cases.

We should probably contact manfer to get code from the old pageear removed from CVS and mark the module as abandoned.

Hi,

I don't know if there is something more to do with pageear. I just unpublised the realeases for the project page so I think drupal sites using it are going to see it as not maintained. In the project page I just wrote instructions on how to install curlypage instead. Maybe is not problem if you decide to delete the project from CVS to eliminate the included not GPL code there.

About curlypage it includes swfobject2 that is released under MIT license, compatible with GPL. If that is an issue I could solve it just using the google hosted version following this instructions:

http://code.google.com/p/swfobject/wiki/hosted_library

So if it is an issue tell me and I have no problem to change the code and remove swfobject from curlypage CVS.

Thanks in advance,
manfer

As Why drupal.org doesn't host GPL-"compatible" code reports, the files in Drupal.org CVS should be licensed under GPL License v2+, which is the same license used by Drupal core module.

About Curlypage issue, now swfobject is loaded from external source (google hosted swfobject).

• Curlypage 5.x-2.2 released.
• Curlypage 6.x-2.2 released.
• Curlypage 7.x-2.x-dev updated.
• Curlypage HEAD updated.

I think it is solved but I let drupal webmaster decide if it must be marked as fixed.

As Dave said, PageEar code should be removed from CVS.

Should not we remove also the archives created for each release too?

Does anything else need to be done?

Per comments above, the Pageear project's codebase needs to be removed from the git server.

PageEar is depreciated in favour of CurlyPage. PageEar is marked as obsolete, there are no published releases and no users. Except for swfobject.js (permissive MIT license) I found no third party materials in PageEar. There is no need to purge swfobject.js as it can be considered relicensed as GPLv2+.

I found no third party materials in CurlyPage.

Hence, I am closing this as "works as designed".