EPL license compliance issues
Created by: nyssen
The Eclipse Graphical Editing Framework project (https://www.eclipse.org/gef/), which I lead, aims at providing a complete Eclipse-based DOT authoring environment (in terms of its GEF4 DOT component: https://wiki.eclipse.org/GEF/GEF4/DOT), We are currently building that up, including an Xtext-based DOT editor, as well as a JavaFX-based DOT graph viewer. As part of this, we rely on the native dot executable for SVG image export and layout computation (while parsing, serializing, rendering, etc. is performed by GEF4 DOT) and currently point to an external Graphviz installation (via a preference) for this purpose.
In order to provide a nice user experience, as Graphviz is provided unter the terms of the EPL, we would like to bundle a minimal (static) dot executable for mac, linux, and windows already as part of our GEF4 DOT component, so users would no longer have to install it separately. I raised a respective contribution questionnaire (CQ) at the Eclipse Foundation, which is currently being processed, including a detailed check by the Eclipse IP team.
As part of the IP screening process, I had to provide the sources from which the respective dot binaries, we would like to bundle, are actually built. The IP team checks them with respect to non EPL-compliant content. As we only want to bundle a very minimal dot executable, I patched the configure and make scripts to remove any unused plugins or UI components: [graphviz-minimal.patch.txt]. From this, I was able to produce a minimal (static) dot executable as follows:
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./autogen.sh NOCONFIG
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./configure --without-x --without-expat --without-devil --without-webp --without-poppler --without-rsvg --without-ghostscript --without-visio --without-pangocairo --without-lasi --without-glitz --without-freetype2 --without-fontconfig --without-gdk --without-gdk-pixbuf --without-gtk --without-gtkgl --without-gtkglext --without-gts --without-ann --without-glade --without-ming --without-qt --without-quartz --without-gdiplus --without-libgd --without-glut --without-ipsepcola --without-digcola --enable-static --disable-ltdl --disable-shared --disable-tcl
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make
I passed all the files required by this build configuration to the Eclipse ip team (so far I only built for mac and linux, not windows). As part of their initial triage, the Eclipse IP team came across http://www.graphviz.org/mantisbt/view.php?id=1567&history=1#history, which points out some licensing issues in certain lib files (I did not exclude so far). While the quarz plugin mentioned there is definitely not relevant to us (we excluded it from the configuration), the other issues seem to be problematic, especially regex_win32 (which is LPGL).
As I personally cannot really assess that, could you provide some information about whether those parts that there mentioned as problematic are indeed mandatory for a minimal static dot executable (as the one we would like to bundle)? Do you see a chance we could provide a minimal dot executable without relying on these files (especially regex_win32 on windows)? Your help would be highly appreciated.
(https://github.com/ellson/graphviz/files/212690/graphviz-minimal.patch.txt)