Skip to content
New issue

Have a question about this project? Sign up for a free GitHub account to open an issue and contact its maintainers and the community.

By clicking “Sign up for GitHub”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy statement. We’ll occasionally send you account related emails.

Already on GitHub? Sign in to your account

[Question] Is the EPL-2.0 license compatible with GPLv3? #312

Open
nook24 opened this issue Dec 2, 2024 · 3 comments
Open

[Question] Is the EPL-2.0 license compatible with GPLv3? #312

nook24 opened this issue Dec 2, 2024 · 3 comments
Labels

Comments

@nook24
Copy link

nook24 commented Dec 2, 2024

Ask your questions
I'm working on an Angular project, which is licensed unter the GPLv3. From my understanding, the EPL-2.0 is compatible with GPLv3 if:

  • EPL-2.0 library must explicitly permit sublicensing under GPLv3

The current LICENSE has not defined any sub licenses I guess?

elkjs/LICENSE.md

Lines 249 to 264 in dc25206

## Exhibit A – Form of Secondary Licenses Notice {#exhibit-a}
“This Source Code may also be made available under the following
Secondary Licenses when the conditions for such availability set forth
in the Eclipse Public License, v. 2.0 are satisfied: {name license(s),
version(s), and exceptions or additional permissions here}.”
> Simply including a copy of this Agreement, including this Exhibit A is
> not sufficient to license the Source Code under Secondary Licenses.
>
> If it is not possible or desirable to put the notice in a particular
> file, then You may include the notice in a location (such as a LICENSE
> file in a relevant directory) where a recipient would be likely to
> look for such a notice.
>
> You may add additional accurate notices of copyright ownership.

By usage I mean npm install elkjs and calling the API such as const elk = new ELK(). I do not plan to copy or modify any actual elkjs code.

I'm not sure about the distribution and linking part, because Angulars ng build is bundling dependencies and due to I provide Debian and RPM packages, I'm also distributing.

I'm totally fine with an acknowledgment in the the GitHub readme of my project like:

This project uses elkjs which is licensed unter EPL-2.0 [link to elkjs repo]

or something like this.

Many thanks

@nook24 nook24 added the question label Dec 2, 2024
@soerendomroes
Copy link
Member

Hi, adding a secondary license might take a while since this would require a re-licensing step for the project.

@nook24
Copy link
Author

nook24 commented Dec 3, 2024

Hi,

so currently it is not possible for me to use the library? Unfortunately I haven't much experiences with other licenses than GPL, Apache or MIT.
For now I'm probably leaving elkjs alone, and implement my own algorithm.

With that said, the elkjs package has currently over 700k weekly downloads on npm. Not sure how many are in compliant with the EPL-2.0. This was also mentioned in #158
If the project is interested in adding a secondary license to the JavaScript part, I would suggest to create a new Issue, which explains the situation and why a secondary license would be good.
In this issue you could mentioned all contributors (17 according to GitHub) like so:

and ask if they agree to add a secondary license.

I have found two examples for this approach:

This will take some time for all contributors to decide and answers, but I think in the long elkjs would benefit from this.

Just an idea :)

Thanks for your time.

@soerendomroes
Copy link
Member

We are currently rather trying to move to an MIT license but this might be hard since this would most likely require us to also move ELK to an MIT license. Please be patient.
I cannot speak for all projects but mermaid solved it by moving the elkjs integration into a separate project with a separate license.

Sign up for free to join this conversation on GitHub. Already have an account? Sign in to comment
Labels
Projects
None yet
Development

No branches or pull requests

2 participants