Posted by degvalentine on October 14, 2009 at 9:44pm
Can contributed modules contain non-GPL data (other than css and images)?
I have a module to contribute that creates and populates a taxonomy vocabulary. Can the vocabulary terms be distributed under a different license than the code? Could that license also cover the vocabulary terms as a group after installation?
Thanks.
Comments
No
The policy for Drupal.org's CVS repository is "If it goes in here, it must be GPLv2+ because it will be distributed as GPLv2+".
That said, I highly doubt that copyright would cover a list of taxonomy terms in the first place. They are probably too insubstantial for copyright to apply.
licensing clarification
Crell, thanks for the fast reply.
I saw that quote in the FAQ. I thought it might not be so straight-forward based on this comment: http://groups.drupal.org/node/12646#comment-40840.
Assuming the terms and their hierarchy is covered by copyright (it contains ~10k terms based on original research) and the file doesn't interact with Drupal code (only with the parent module's install script), does it still fall under the GPLv2+ if distributed through the CVS repository? If so, is there a common way to distribute protected material in conjunction with GPL code from the repository (such as having the module download the content from another server on install)?
Thanks again for the clarification.
If you have some time to read
If you have some time to read there is a discussion about this issue related to install profiles here http://drupal.org/node/594704
The comon way is to have a download link in the documentation to the external source and information about where to put the files. Best would be to ask if the external code could be made gpl anyway.
summary
A brief summary of http://drupal.org/node/594704 as it relates to my issue for those with a similar problem: Only GPL-licensed code can be on the CVS. Look at the WYSIWYG module (http://drupal.org/project/wysiwyg) for an example of how to handle 3rd-party code dependencies.
I will likely restructure my module to use a similar mechanism to the wysiwyg module if I cannot get the vocabulary terms under GPL from the author.
@s.Daniel Thanks for pointing me to that topic - very helpful.