Elimination of GPL violations in Mimemagic library led to a collection when assembling Ruby on Rails

The author of the popular Ruby library mimemagic , numbering more than 100 million downloads, due to The GPLv2 license code was forced to Change License with MIT on GPLv2. All old Mimemagic issues were deleted, the development was stopped, and repository on GitHub translated into the archive state.

These actions led to a violation of the ability to build projects using MimeMagic as a dependence and licensed liccents that are incompatible with GPLv2. When using the new version of MimeMagic, the developers of other projects, including propritation (MIT license admits such use), are obliged to transfer their code under GPL. The problem was aggravated by the fact that the old versions under the MIT license stopped surrendered from Rubygems.org. If packet caching is not included on the assembly server, an attempt to assemble projects with past versions of Mimemagic will fail.

Under the blow, including the Ruby On Rails framework, which is supplied under the MIT license and cannot include components under GPL. The problem has taken global character – if directly change touched 172 packages, then with regard to dependencies suffered more 577 thousand repositories.

GPL license violation in the MimeMagic project is related to the use of the /shared-mime-info supplied under the license GPLv2. Mimemagic source texts were supplied under the MIT license and the use of the GPLv2 license in the License code required the distribution of the product also under the GPLV2 license. The output would be the creation of a shared-mime-info library license, which only Several hundred lines of code , But the accompanying MimeMagic will decide to stop the development of his project, so this work will quickly have to fulfill someone else. Perhaps if the author Mimemagic wishes to return his project to the system, you will need to create a MimeMagic forka and replacing dependency in all related projects.

/Media reports.