By hotspoons on

If I wanted to release a module, or a portion of a module, under a more permissive license, such as LGPL2 or BSD, and post it to the drupal.org cvs repository, how would I go about that? Thanks,

-Rich

⋅ Categories: Drupal 6.x, Drupal 7.x

Comments

nedjo’s picture

nedjo
he/him/his
Primary language English
commented

The short answer is, you wouldn't. Only GPL code is permitted in the Drupal CVS repository. It's a condition of our CVS accounts that we post only GPL code.

Edit: see http://drupal.org/node/422996 and http://drupal.org/node/66113.

hotspoons’s picture

hotspoons commented

I was more talking to this point:

This policy does not apply to original code written by a project maintainer. For example, if you write an integration library to connect a Drupal module to another API, you may include it in CVS (licensed under the GPL), since this will be the original version of the library.

I ended up reading a lot of what was linked from all the discussion you provided, and for the purposes of what I plan, I can write a GPLv2 API connector to what ever I need to, and if I have anything that will link to code or libraries not explicitly permitted by dynamic linking through GPLv2, I will host a connector library off of drupal.org that will be licensed under a more permissive license (LGPLv2.1, BSD, apache, etc.) so it will suit my needs and still be compatible with the Drupal hosted code, just not distributable with it. I understand the need to keep from stepping in licensing beartraps and completely respect the policy, as it does give leeway and the capability to integrate a project that is not GPLv2 with Drupal.

So you answered my question. Thanks!

hotspoons’s picture

hotspoons commented

I added a comment to one of the posts linked above with my understanding of the external libraries policy; it is here: http://drupal.org/node/66113#comment-2029768

WorldFallz’s picture

WorldFallz commented

It doesn't get much clearer than this: http://drupal.org/licensing/faq#q4

That is the most current and official policy and doesn't leave much room for doubt. Also, as a webmaster, I have seen projects/code unpublished and removed from drupal.org for not adhering to that policy.

Simply stated, code hosted in the drupal.org cvs repository must be GPL v2 or later. period.