GPL being violated

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Oliver Gordon

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Mar 14, 2023, 12:58:47 PM3/14/23

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Hi there.

I just wanted you to be aware of a violation of the GPL.

TextAttack (https://github.com/QData/TextAttack) is quite a large library with a number of forks and stars, that claims to be MIT licensed. However, it has a number of depenencies, including gensim, that are GPL.

I have tried to make the owners aware (https://github.com/QData/TextAttack/issues/718), and while they are quite active on other issues they have ignored this being brought to their attention

Gordon Mohr

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Mar 15, 2023, 4:54:01 PM3/15/23

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Note: Gensim is licensed under the "Lesser" GPL (aka "LGPL" https://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/lgpl-2.1.html).

I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is that under the LGPL's terms, its usage as a library/dependency in non-GPL/non-copyleft projects is specifically allowed. So as far as I can tell, there's no violation concerning Gensim here.

Whether any of the other license-violations alleged of TextAttack in your issue <https://github.com/QData/TextAttack/issues/718> are still a concern, I'm not sure. But note that another of the libraries you mention there (num2words) is also LGPL, and the `FuzzyTM` package may have only been pulled into TextAttack because Gensim has recently (erroneously) declared `FuzzyTM` as a dependency (even though its code is never called). That error has been corrected as of the latest 4.3.1 release on the Gensim side: https://github.com/RaRe-Technologies/gensim/pull/3447