On Sun, Apr 21, 2019 at 11:37 AM Pierre Labastie <[email protected]> wrote: > > I've read a little more about this [1], and wants to summarize here what I > understand. Note that I've not checked that what I say is valid in countries > other than US (I've just seen yesterday, when looking at W3m, that a true open > source license is impossible in Japan). jhalfs has been based in US from its > beginning, so let us consider it is under the US law: > - All contributors are copyright holders. There's no need to register to be a > copyright holder, and there is no notion of a minimum contribution to be a > copyright holder. Actually, all contributors have made substantial > contributions, so the point about minimal contribution is not relevant here. > - If there is no license, nobody has right to use, distribute, modify, parts > he or she has not written, unless given explicit permission! Even other > contributors have no right to modify what is already written! This is the aim > of the license to relax such permissions. > - Jeremy, the initiator of the project has chosen the GPLv2 license, so all > contributions are under this license. Changing to another license is possible > only if the new license is compatible with the previous one, unless the > copyright holders agree to change to an incompatible license. Here, the only > compatible license is GPLv3. AGPLv3 is not (too restrictive), LGPLv3 is not > (too permissive), and other common licenses (MIT, Apache, Mozilla) are too > permissive too. At this point, we have two possibilities: > - go to GPLv3 (or keep GLPv2, but it is not well suited to modern ways of > collaborating). > - Ask the seven contributors whether they accept a more permissive license > (I would push for MIT. Other licenses are not very sensible for jhalfs).
My preference would be to try this first, seeking permission to move to MIT. If that fails what issue is there with keeping GPLv2? I believe a move to Github does not really impact the license and I'm not really a huge fan of GPLv3, although admittedly it's been a while since I looked at its details. Overall, I think it's just more complex that it needs to be. I like the simplicity of MIT or BSD licenses. > - Gihub has two types of repo: > - private, means a few collaborators (maximum of 4 with free github) can > access the repository, but it is not visible to anybody else > - public, means it is visible to anybody, and anybody can be given commits > right, but there are again to possibilities: > - owned by an individual, who has all the administrative rights. > - owned by an organization. Means there may be several owners, which > may give various rights to users (administration, commit, etc, I've > not read it in full yet) Private would make it hard to collaborate and I think kind of defeats the purpose. Given the history of ALFS, I'd say an organization (you can create one and invite others to be admins) makes the most sense. JH -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/alfs-discuss FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/faq/ Unsubscribe: See the above information page
