Please seek legal advice on whether capistrano is GPL

[Will Bryant]

Hi all,

Just a quick note to say that following the discussion on https://github.com/capistrano/capistrano/issues/926, I would strongly encourage all Capistrano v3 users whose organisations may see any issue in using GPLed software as part of their deployment stack to seek independent legal advice regarding the GPL.

SSHkit is GPL, and Capistrano uses it.

Lee's IP lawyers have a very different interpretation of the license of the resulting work to that of the IP specialists we have engaged, and in my personal experience, the majority of people discussing OSS licenses on the net interpret the GPL to mean that any combined work must be GPLed, based primarily on the following license.

If the latter interpretation is correct then Capistrano v3 is GPLed, even though its own code is MIT as per the license file.  This may or may not be an issue for you depending on your situation.

Best regards,

Will

[Lee Hambley]

Further to Will's comments, I'd like to point out that the GPL was written to protect against binary-distributed applications and programs from sealing FOSS code.

Given that there is no binary (ok, it's a tarball, but the source is in tact) distribution of Ruby's gem packages, and that worse like "incorporated" and "compiled" have a very different meaning in scripted languages from their meanings when writing compiled languages, that it's the position of our IP lawyer that this does not cause a copy-left "viral" conversion of Capistrano to GPL.

A note, here, as in the issue listed, the LGPL was designed to counter some of these issues (and allow dynamic linking without the viral nature of the GPL taking over) - it is the opinion of our lawyer that the "dynamic linking" clauses would add nothing to the discussion as the two pieces of software are not incorporated into one another, they are peers, installed in a development environment. (in the same way that when running `some | software here | cat > somefile` the GPL equally does not virally traverse the "pipe" interface.

It's an issue which has never been fully (publicly, at least) addressed: how do old licences that predate the modern packaging systems and modern programming paradigms apply?

Lee Hambley

--

http://lee.hambley.name/

+49 (0) 170 298 5667

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