Possible GPLv2 violation on go-gl/glh and go-gl/text

[André Moraes]

https://github.com/go-gl/glh/issues/41 is reporting a possible violation of GPLv2 on go-gl/{glh, text} packages due to a dependency on freetype to render text. Freetype is GPLv2 licensed and since those packages depend on it they should also be GPLv2.

Few months ago pwaller was asking about the use of text rendering on glh. Maybe it's time to remove text rendering from there to avoid the freetype issue, also to keep the text rendering available but also under BSD license, we should implement something like a CODEC (similar to image/png image/jpeg) where the text package depends on a interface and other packages can provide a concrete implementation.

I have some spare time to do that, but I prefer discussing this here before starting any kindo of coding.

[unit0x03]

I like the idea of doing a CODEC style implementation, however, are there any options other than freetype at the moment? I've seen papers on doing better subpixel rendering from various sources, but I'm not aware of any open source rendering systems we could actually leverage on the implementation end.

I suppose just splitting it out codec style does prevent direct linking into the go-gl libraries, so that'd be enough to satisfy licensing requirements for now?

Graeme

--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "go-gl OpenGL libraries for go" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to go-gl+un...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[Peter Waller]

I've replied on the issue, which is my preferred place to discuss this for now. If we want to eliminate the problem entirely we might have to rewrite or re-license gltext. I'm in favour of removing the text facilities from glh which will eliminate the problem there.

https://github.com/go-gl/glh/issues/41

[Peter Waller]

For the record I think this is now fixed on glh by removing the text code altogether. Now it's just gltext, for which I've opened a new issue: https://github.com/go-gl/gltext/issues/9