Question

So I am importing a library (reportlab), which is licensed BSD, but itself uses some libraries that are licensed GPL.

My question is, if I import reportlab into python – do I have to abide by BSD or GPL license?

Answer 1

IANAL either, but I think it doesn’t even come into play as long as you are not going to distribute the other software as well. For example, if you just tell your users “you have to install pyRXP in order to use this” (maybe easier if you make that “reportlab”), I think the GPL does not apply to your own code.

EDIT: While there is no problem with using the reportlab toolkit in this particular case, the above interpretation does not seem to be correct (see agf’s comments on this answer below, as well as his own answer)

Note that the reportlab toolkit (although it’s by the same company “ReportLab”) doesn’t necessarily use pyRXP. They are two different things, each with it’s own license.

Looking at reportlab’s source code, in reportlab.lib.rparsexml, it seems that pyRXP is only imported if it is installed (separately, because it is not included), and it uses another xml parser if pyRXP is not available. (I guess this is their way of allowing pyRXP to be used, and still keeping reportlab under BSD license)

But maybe you’d best ask on the reportlab mailing list…