newt

#31 newt LICENSE?
Opened by hieunv. Modified

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Dear maintainers,

I am reviewing the licensing implications of using newt in my project and noticed a potential inconsistency regarding the declared license.

The COPYING file in the newt source indicates that it is licensed under the GNU Library General Public License v2 (LGPL-2.0). However, I see that newt includes and links to the S-Lang library, which (according to the official S-Lang homepage) is licensed under the GNU General Public License v2 only (GPL-2.0-only) for all 2.x versions.

From S-Lang's license page:

"Version 2 [of S-Lang] must be distributed solely under the terms of the GNU General Public License."

As I understand it, GPL-2.0 is a strong copyleft license that does not permit linking from LGPL-licensed libraries unless the entire combined work complies with the GPL. Therefore, since newt uses and links to slang, wouldn't that effectively mean that newt must also be licensed under GPL-2.0, not LGPL?

As I understand it, the newt source code could use any license compatible with the slang's GPLv2+ license. The "effective" license when they are linked together is GPLv2+, but that doesn't mean newt has to be relicensed.

This is not an uncommon case. In a distribution like Fedora you could analyze the license field, see https://docs.stg.fedoraproject.org/en-US/legal/license-field/#_no_effective_license_analysis
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