[SOLVED] Still license issues with SOFA plugins

I noticed that there was a pull request targeting license stuff not long ago (v16.12), which is nice, but I still found some delicate license issues, which potentially can cause trouble for users of SOFA and the SOFA-devs. Just from a first look into the plugin folder for all plugins, that do NOT contain the string “LGPL”, I found conflicting license information. I didn’t yet check the “LGPL”-plugins or SOFA in general for potential transitive license issues (conflicting with licenses of third-party dependencies). It’s also hard to make a pull request for this issues as it is something that the SOFA devs have to decide.

1. BulletCollisionDetection
– getModuleLicence() returns “Private”
– text file with information “LICENCE: Private”
– initBulletCollisionDetection.cpp has LGPL 2.1 header
– other source files don’t have a license header
– depends on BulletPhysics, which is licensed under zlib (with exceptions!)

2. ExternalBehaviorModel
– getModuleLicence() returns “???”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

3. Haption
– getModuleLicence() not defined
– text file with information “LICENCE: None”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

4. ManifoldTopologies
– getModuleLicence() returns “?”
– text file with information “LICENCE: ??”

5. OpenCTMPlugin
– getModuleLicence() returns “Licence ZLIB”
– text file with information “LICENCE: OpenCTM library is an Open source, with a very liberal license (zlib/libpng license).”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

6. Registration
– getModuleLicence() returns “QPL”
– has a file LICENCE.txt (should be LICENSE.txt), which states QPL
– Source files have LGPL 2.1 header

7. SofaHAPI
– getModuleLicence() returns “GPL”
– text file with information “LICENCE: GPL”
– source files have LGPL 2.1 header

8. SofaPML
– getModuleLicence() returns empty string
– no text file with license information
– source files have both (!) LGPL 2.1 and GPL 2 headers each

General notes:
– I would expect that every plugin provides a getModuleLicense() function and that this function returns a non-empty string with a valid license
– I would expect getModuleLicense() to return the license version as well if it applies (e.g. LGPL, GPL)
– I would expect getModuleLicense() to follow a common scheme, e.g., the official license title like “zlib” instead of “License ZLIB”
– Search/replace “licence/Licence/LICENCE” to “license/License/LICENSE” would help searching for license information (including filenames and file contents)