Wireshark · Wireshark-dev: Re: [Wireshark-dev] Licensing of tools/html2text.py

[Evan Huus <eapache@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Nov 3, 2013 at 3:24 PM, Joerg Mayer <jmayer@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> On Sun, Nov 03, 2013 at 10:11:02AM -0500, Evan Huus wrote:
>> It appears to be licensed under GPLv3 only, which makes it
>> incompatible for us to include.
>>
>> It seems to be included only because links/lynx didn't appear to work
>> a while ago when building under WIndows. If that is no longer true
>> then I think we can just remove it with no loss of functionality?
>>
>> Other suggestions, alternatives, etc welcome of course.
>
> If I understand it correctly, this tool is only used during the build
> process. As long as it doesn't effect the license of its output and is
> not installed as part of the binary package, I don't see a problem in using
> it during the build process or including it in the source distribution.
> We have to make sure its license is correctly mentioned in our COPYING
> file.

Good point - PIDL is already mentioned at the top of COPYING in this way.

Now the question becomes, are we legally required to list *all*
additional licenses in COPYING, or only when the license itself
requires it? There are currently a couple of licenses which we carry
but aren't listed in COPYING, in addition to GPLv3 (html2text.py) and
GPLv3+ (PIDL) which is mentioned but not included.