License clarification

[David Boeger]

Hello Matthias,

It does! My use case involves generating rust bindings for
packagekit-glib2. My understanding is that MIT-licensed rust code should be
able to link to the LGPL-licensed interfaces, though it is of course my own
responsibility to verify that is the case before I distribute such code.

There seem to be at least a few people who have shared solutions on
crates.io and GitHub, though none seem especially well maintained or
documented, hence my attempt to do it on my own. Interestingly, Pop!-OS
seems to have gone the route of using D-Bus directly. Perhaps there are
other users I am not aware of, as I am very new to PackageKit in general.

Thanks,
David

On Sat, Feb 10, 2024 at 1:18 AM Matthias Klumpp <matthias at tenstral.net>
wrote:

> Hi David!
>
> Am Sa., 10. Feb. 2024 um 09:51 Uhr schrieb David Boeger <
> dmboeger at gmail.com>:
> >
> > Hello,
> >
> > Sorry if this is the wrong place to ask, but the IRC was fairly silent
> when I logged in. I am trying to determine the license of packagekit-glib2.
> I cloned PackageKit from GitHub and see that COPYING and most other files
> under packagekit-glib2 indicat LGPLv2, but there are a few (including
> packagekit.h) which suggest GPLv2:
> >
> > ```
> > [root at daring-gibbon packagekit-glib2]# pwd
> > /root/PackageKit/lib/packagekit-glib2
> > [root at daring-gibbon packagekit-glib2]# grep "Licensed under the GNU
> Lesser General Public License" *.h | wc -l
> > 39
> > [root at daring-gibbon packagekit-glib2]# grep "Licensed under the GNU
> General Public License" *.h | wc -l
> > 5
> > ```
> >
> > It looks like the intention all the way back in 2010 was to put it under
> the LGPL, but it's not clear to me that it is currently. Is there any
> definitive way to determine the license?
>
> No. The packagekit daemon (the thing that actually performs work in
> the background) is GPL-2.0 licensed, while anything you link to from a
> client, like libpackagekit-glib2, is LGPL-2.0 licensed.
> Some backends (loaded as modules) also have their own licenses.
>
> If you use PK from one of your apps, you only ever directly interact
> with the LGPL'ed parts from your code, with the daemon processing
> things in the background.
>
> I hope that clears things up!
> Best,
>     Matthias
>
> --
> I welcome VSRE emails. See http://vsre.info/
>
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