The author of the popular Ruby library mimemagic, which has over 100 million downloads, was forced to change the license from MIT to GPLv2 due to a discovered violation of the GPLv2 license within the project. Only versions 0.3.6 and 0.4.0, supplied under GPL, remain on RubyGems, while all older releases under the MIT license have been removed. Furthermore, the development of mimemagic has been halted, and the repository on GitHub has been archived.
These actions resulted in the disruption of projects that use mimemagic as a dependency and are licensed under terms incompatible with GPLv2. With the new version of mimemagic, developers of other projects, including proprietary ones (the MIT license allows such usage), are required to relicense their code under GPL. The situation was worsened by the fact that older versions under the MIT license are no longer available from RubyGems.org. If caching of packages is not enabled, attempts to build projects with past versions of mimemagic will lead to failure. server The Ruby on Rails framework, which loads mimemagic as a dependency, is among those affected. Ruby on Rails is distributed under the MIT license and cannot include components under GPL. The problem has become widespread — while the direct change affected 172 packages, over 577,000 repositories have been impacted when considering dependencies.
The GPL license violation in the mimemagic project is related to the inclusion of the file freedesktop.org.xml in the code, which is a copy of the MIME type database from the shared-mime-info library. The specified file is distributed under the GPLv2 license, while the shared-mime-info library is under the ISC license, which is compatible with GPL. The source code of mimemagic was supplied under the MIT license, and the inclusion of components under GPLv2 requires distributing the derivative work under a license compatible with GPLv2. The maintainer of shared-mime-info brought this to attention, and the author of mimemagic agreed to the requirement to change the license.
The violation of the GPL license in the mimemagic project is related to the inclusion in the code of the file freedesktop.org.xml, which is a copy of the MIME type database from the shared-mime-info library. The specified file is distributed under the GPLv2 license, while the shared-mime-info library is under the ISC license, which is compatible with GPL. The source code of mimemagic was provided under the MIT license, and supplying components under the GPLv2 license requires distributing the derivative product under a license compatible with GPLv2. The maintainer of shared-mime-info brought this issue to attention, and the author of mimemagic agreed to the requirement to change the license.
The output would involve parsing the XML file on the fly, without supplying freedesktop.org.xml as part of the library, but the accompanying mimemagic has frozen the project's repository, so this task will have to be urgently performed by someone else. If the author of mimemagic does not wish to bring their project back online (they currently refuse), a fork of mimemagic may need to be created and the dependency replaced in all related projects. Transitioning projects reliant on mimemagic to the libmagic library is also being considered.
Source: opennet.ru
