Re: Copyright concerns regarding Seafile
> On 30 May 2019, at 14:48, Ian Jackson <ijackson@chiark.greenend.org.uk> wrote:
>
> However, I am puzzled by something. AFAICT from github seafile-server
> claims to be AGPL3-only. You are talking about a licence conflict
> with libzdb which is GPL3+.
>
> But GPL3+ and AGPL3 are compatible. So why did the seafile developers
> feel the need to engage in this subterfuge ?
I think it started with this issue at Github [1]. The Seafile team had copied code from Git which made them (reluctant) to have to license Seafile under GPLv2. This caused a problem with using libzdb which is only GPLv3. Another point is that Seafile has a proprietary professional edition server based upon the open source server code [2]. I think this was the motivation for trying to remove libzdb, and the Git code from seafile-server.
As far as I know there doesn't exist a MIT/BSD licensed C library with libzdb’s features, which they could use instead. So copying the libzdb code with some shuffling and some obfuscation was probably seen as a good idea.
Jan-Henrik
1. https://github.com/haiwen/seafile/issues/666
2. https://www.seafile.com/en/product/private_server/
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