[josm-dev] License clarification for JOSM plugins

[Ulf Lamping]

Giovanni Mascellani schrieb:
> Hi all!
>
> It's the first time I'm writing here, so let me present quickly myself:
> I'm Giovanni Mascellani, a student in Pisa, Italy, and I'm working
> together with Andreas Putzo and Petter Reinholdsten on a Debian package
> for josm and its plugins.
>
> As we are distributing our packages under the GPL-3 (or later) license,
> we'd need to make sure that we have legal rights to do so. Anyway,
> plugins validator and ywms from the SVN repository
> http://svn.openstreetmap.org/applications/editors/josm/plugins/ contain
> the text of the GPL-2 without any further information. Should this be
> understood as a GPL-2 only licensing or as a GPL-2 or later? Could you
> please add a note that clarifies this on the SVN? (Debian is very picky
> about having a perfectly legally-clean archive!)
>
> Thank you for your work on JOSM, and have a nice mapping!
>
> Regards, Giovanni.
>   
Hi!

Well, first of all, there's already a debian package for JOSM and the 
Plugins in the osm subversion which is maintained by Joerg Ostertag.


Anyway, please be careful that you can/should distribute JOSM (and it's 
plugins) under GPL v3!!!

The provided JOSM license text LICENSE states V2 and unless all JOSM and 
Plugin files clearly states "GPLv2 or later" somewhere (which they don't 
do AFAIK), there's no legal way IMHO  to provide JOSM under GPLv3 - as 
the license versions are not compatible.

Not all code released under GPLv2 is stated to be compatible with GPLv3 
"... or any later version ..." - I don't know if it's because it was 
intended for JOSM or only by chance ...

Regards, ULFL