Clarify license for Debian packaging about pylama HOT 5 CLOSED

Here are the commit history details regarding the licensing terms:

• Commit f6f4aab (2012-08-17) is the initial commit that shows that the project was originally licensed under GNU LGPL.
• Commits b1b10d1 (2013-05-21), 868b533 (2013-06-06) and dcb35e4 (2013-08-07) mention BSD license.
• Commit a6ce465 (2013-06-06) shows the intention of moving from GNU LGPL to BSD license.
• Commit 4f13f63 (2014-06-30) mentions GNU LGPL in the classifiers metadata.

In the latest master branch (at commit c38d598):

• Files LICENSE and setup.py mention GNU LGPL only.
• Files docs/index.rst, pylama/libs/inirama.py, and README.rst mention BSD license only.
• File pylama/__init__.py mentions both BSD license and GNU LGPL.

The project was originally licensed under GNU LGPL but later the author appears to have an intention of moving to BSD license. While there are several commits that provide evidence in favour of this conclusion, commit 4f13f63 contradicts this conclusion. The only place in the project that attempts to communicate the license explicitly to users or readers is README.rst which mentions:

Licensed under a BSD license.

It is unclear which BSD license (BSD-3-Clause or BSD-2-Clause) is meant here.

Here is Debian's interpretation of the licensing terms (quoting from /usr/share/doc/pylama/copyright of Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)):

Format: http://www.debian.org/doc/packaging-manuals/copyright-format/1.0/
Upstream-Name: pylama
Source: https://github.com/klen/pylama

Files:     *
Copyright: 2013 copyright Kirill Klenov <[email protected]>
License:   LGPL-3+

Files:     pylama/__init__.py
Copyright: 2013 copyright Kirill Klenov <[email protected]>
License:   LGPL-3+ or BSD-3-clause

Files:     pylama/libs/inirama.py
Copyright: 2013 copyright Kirill Klenov <[email protected]>
License:   BSD-3-clause

Files:     debian/*
Copyright: ChangZhuo Chen (陳昌倬) <[email protected]>
License:   LGPL-3+

from pylama.

@klen

Can you help to clarify the license of pylama/__init__.py. Is it BSD or LGPL?

We want to provide pylama into Debian, and this is the only thing we need to fix before uploading.

from pylama.

I'd like to know that as well!

from pylama.

@klen No update about this? LGPL-3+ and BSD-3-clause is a very big difference.

from pylama.

From the version 8.0.0+ Pylama has the MIT license.

from pylama.