Question about LGPL license for RPM package.

Hiroyuki Iizaka hiizaka at mvista.com
Fri Aug 19 07:11:09 UTC 2011


Hello,

I asked to about a license of rpm several months ago.

There is a customer hesitating about using rpm for distribution of
their proprietary software because this does not become clear.

I asked same question to tec support of RH about this but I could
not get clear answer. Because the engineer who developed
it seemed to have already leave for another job.

For the request of the customer, I ask it here once again.


----------------------------------------------------------------------------

According to COPYING file (rpm-4.3.3-6.0.7.1100783.src.rpm),
under lib subdirectory of RPM source code can distribute LGPL.

-< rpm-4.3.3/COPYING >---------------------------------------------------
...
The entire code base may be distributed under the terms of the GNU General
Public License (GPL), which appears immediately below.  Alternatively,
all of the source code in the lib subdirectory of the RPM source code
distribution as well as any code derived from that code may instead be
distributed under the GNU Library General Public License (LGPL), at the
choice of the distributor.
...
-------------------------------------------------------------------------

But, the source code of librpmdb.so and librpmio.so are not
under lib subdirectory of RPM source code like following.

# pwd
/work/RPM/rpm-4.3.3
# ls -l
...
drwxr-xr-x  2 10050 510   4096 Feb  1  2005 lib    <-- lib subdirectory
...
drwxr-xr-x  2 10050 510   4096 Feb  1  2005 rpmdb  <-- separate directory
drwxr-xr-x  2 10050 510   4096 Feb  1  2005 rpmio  <-- separate directory

/usr/lib/librpmdb.so and /usr/lib/librpmio.so are shared library,
so I suppose that these licenses are LGPL.

I checked under rpmdb and rpmio directory, but I couldn't find
any documentation or comment for license.

The question is, the license of librpmdb.so / librpmio.so are LGPL?


Thanks in advance.

-- 
Hiroyuki Iizaka


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