License issue: wayland-protocols-misc is MIT but builds from LGPL source

[samcday]

In the process of packaging this crate for Fedora, it was identified that the server-decoration.xml protocol descriptor is licensed as LGPL 2.1, whilst the crate is published as MIT.

Is this something that has already been audited/considered, or is this something that was overlooked similar to #319 ?

[kchibisov]

if you generate code based on LGPL text(not code) is it really LGPL after doing so?

[samcday]

if you generate code based on LGPL text(not code) is it really LGPL after doing so?

Great question, and I wondered that myself when raising this issue. I'm guessing neither of us are lawyers 😅

[decathorpe]

The question whether generated code is covered by the same license as the definitions it's generated from is kind of an independent issue. But either way, the protocol definition xml itself is clearly LGPL, and it's included as a source file in the crate.

[kchibisov]

The source file is not compiled in the code though, only pulled as submodule and used as a source for building. The same applies for all C projects for example that use said protocol, wlroots, etc.

Generally it's an API definition, so API definition to have a license doesn't make any sense.

[kchibisov]

The thing is that the crate itself is MIT. The code that is being generated is based on the public API that is for whatever reason declared as LGPL and has a license in the first place, where the intention is more like who maintains the protocol. The file is correctly attributes, but is not a part of the crate final binary. The final binary doesn't have anything that was taken from that file. The license says program, but it's an API definition and is not a program to be pedantic.

Thus given that the said file is not present in the end binary, but rather redistributed with its license in place, it doesn't make the binaries that statically link that crate LGPL and also doesn't make the crate itself LGPL, since it's not a part of an end binary.

[kchibisov]

Fedora probably has layers, so they can figure it out. The linked issue in the past was due to code being GPL-3.0, right now it's just a built time xml file that is not a part of an end user binary.

[decathorpe]

Yes - we can declare the package that contains the source files for the wayland-protocols-misc crate as containing MIT and LGPL parts, but leave the crate metadata as MIT. This should convey that while there are files covered by different licences included in the source code of this crate, the files covered by the LGPL do not contribute to compiled artifacts.