(master) Licence conflict making distributing MuseScore nightlies/alpha illegal

• Nov 2, 2018 - 21:42
Reported version
3.0
Priority
P0 - Critical
Type
Development
Frequency
Once
Severity
S1 - Blocker
Reproducibility
Always
Status
closed
Regression
Yes
Workaround
No
Project
MuseScore

MuseScore contains components (including most of libmscore and mscore itself) that are licenced under GPLv2 “no later version”.

MuseScore contains thirdparty/diff/ which is under Apache 2 licence, which is not compatible with the GPLv2 (only the GPLv3).

Until now, this code was unused, so this wasn’t a problem for Debian, although according to https://sourceforge.net/p/mscore/mailman/message/36428618/ OpenSuSE had a problem with it.

But now, diff_match_patch is actually used (e.g. in libmscore/scorefile.cpp), so that means MuseScore 3 is illegal at the moment.

Comments

• Nov 2, 2018 - 22:05

We are discussing this topic with @dmitrio95. He will remove this dependency and rework the code accordingly. The topic arised about month ago in the MuseScore dev mailing list, btw.

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