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The lib.licenses.gpl3 attribute refers to GPL 3.0 only. Unfortunately, it is not clear from the attribute name so people often use that without realizing lib.licenses.gpl3Plus might be more precise.

To avoid this confusion, the unqualified GNU licenses were deprecated, in line with the GNU recommendations.

What to do?

Replace the deprecated unqualified in meta.license as follows:

  • gpl2 by either gpl2Plus or gpl2Only
  • gpl3 by either gpl3Plus or gpl3Only
  • lgpl2 by either lgpl2Plus or lgpl2Only
  • lgpl21 by either lgpl21Plus or lgpl21Only
  • lgpl3 by either lgpl3Plus or lgpl3Only

How to determine license

Projects might mention license terms in the README file or on their homepage.

If that is not the case, check few source files. They might contain a blurb in the comment at the top of a file, similar to the following:

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

You can also try to grep (or search on GitHub) the repository for license.

Do not rely on the contents of COPYING file or the license shown by the GitHub/GitLab interface (which is determined from the COPYING file) – the file only contains the text of GNU ?GPL itself, as mandated by the license. The extra terms allowing to use later versions of the license would be stored in the source code/documentation.

If no statement about license terms is found, you should ask the project maintainers to clarify.

See also