On 26 February 2012 13:10, D. Michael McIntyre <[email protected]> wrote: > There was a time when I cared a great deal, and felt really strongly that > Rosegarden should stay with GPLv2. Now, I really don't care so much anymore, > or even remember what the fuss was all about.
(Digressing, now that we seem to have come to a decision about the substance of it) I'm in two minds about the GPLv3. On the one hand, it's increasingly clear that the "threat" the GPLv3 was intended to address is a real one. The "app store" delivery and installation model is going to take over the world (as much as it hasn't already), and it subverts a part of the point of the original GPL -- it doesn't make any difference whether users can get your source code, if they have no authorisation to build and install an application from it anyway. The trend toward devices that "refuse to be programmed" is a big problem for Free Software, and the GPLv3 tries to resist that trend -- a resistance that is probably futile but certainly principled. On the other hand, the GPLv3 is arguably the worst thing that ever happened to Free Software in terms of how it is understood by developers. GPLv2 was both fairly comprehensible and fairly close to a "natural" mental model of how software should be reused for many developers. GPLv3 introduces confusion: not only do we now have a choice of two licences both called the GPL with various voices on either side advocating for one or the other, but the newer one is enormously harder to understand, the two are not compatible, and the "workaround" for compatibility (the "or later" clause) is itself hard to keep track of, since it's not part of the licence itself and code in the real world often omits it. I believe (without having any figures to back it up) that there's been something of a "flight to BSD" among developers over the past few years, and that this is partly because of the convenience and apparent "free money!" angle of the app store model (to which I suppose a Free Software advocate should reply: good riddance), and partly because the appearance of the GPLv3 has ensured that GPL is now associated even more than ever with squabbling factions of pedantry that many reasonable developers don't want to get involved with. Chris ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Virtualization & Cloud Management Using Capacity Planning Cloud computing makes use of virtualization - but cloud computing also focuses on allowing computing to be delivered as a service. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfnl/114/51521223/ _______________________________________________ Rosegarden-devel mailing list [email protected] - use the link below to unsubscribe https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/rosegarden-devel
