On Fri, Jun 03, 2005 at 10:47:18AM -0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > 3. Add the following text to the license: > > "As a special exception, you have permission to link this program with > code which is licensed under the Common Public Licence or the Eclipse > Public Licence, as long as you follow the requirements of the GNU GPL in > regard to all of the software in the executable aside from the software > which is licensed under the Common Public License or the Eclipse Public > License." > > This would allow the redistribution of works which combined darcs and > CPL'ed code, but it would not allow the redistribution of works which > combined darcs and proprietary code.
This option seems best to me (assuming we go with any change at all). I now see (from your explanation) that although the CPL is copyleft, it is LGPL-style copyleft, which seems non-optimal to me (i.e. it would allow a proprietary version of darcs). This exception would retain the full copyleft, while allowing the creation of mixed CPL/GPL projects (which would themselves be limited to be two-license projects). There is the downside (regarding your other email with the diagrams) that we'd have to drop the exception for any GPL code that gets incorporated into darcs (e.g. git code), or contact the author, so maintaining the exception could be a continuing headache, possibly for no benefit. But as long as it's not *my* headache (or a headache forced upon all darcs developers), I'm okay with that. Which means that I'll continue accept new source files that are pure GPL, and the CPL exception wouldn't necesarily apply to all files. It would be up to the "CPL maintainer" to contact all authors of new GPL files and get permission to add the exception. > The reason I care about it in specific is that I downloaded the darcs > eclipse plugin yesterday. It came with a note "For license reasons, > Darcs itself is not included in this software. In order to use the > plugin, you need an executable installed on your system. You can download > Darcs at http://darcs.net";. I would strongly assert that including a darcs executable along with the eclipse plugin would be "mere aggregation" under the terms of the GPL, and perfectly legal. If you *can* use a vanilla version of darcs with the plugin, then I don't see how the plugin could be a derived work of darcs. If it *were* a derived work of darcs, you wouldn't be able to distribute it either with or without darcs itself except under the terms of the GPL. Note: when I say "strongly assert", I'm being a bit vague, because legally I can't speak for the position of all the authors of darcs, and one of them might sue you for copyright violation. But if they did, I'd be willing to act as a witness on the GPL (not that I'd qualify as an expert witness...) stating that I don't consider the combination of a darcs executable with a program that calls the said executable a derived work, and that packaging them together seems to me like "mere aggregation". > > In summary, if you (or anyone else) wanted to contact all the darcs > > contributors to get agreement to dual-license darcs under both GPL and > > CPL, I'd agree. But it's not something that greatly interests me, and > > I'm not going to go to the trouble myself. > > I am willing to do the "contacting authors" work. I'm thinking that perhaps the best option would be to ask authors to assign copyright to me. I didn't want to do this, but it would definitely simplify future changes of license. I definitely don't want to force contributors to assign copyright, but making it easy might be a good idea, just to avoid this trouble in the future. And I suspect that many darcs contributors would be more willing to trust my judgement than to add a new copyright exception that they might not want to bother reading up on enough to fully understand. Also, if we had copyrights assigned to me, I could be more specific in creating exceptions as needed (since every exception wouldn't require contacting 50 authors), and could add exceptions specifically for a given purpose. I.e. an exception that says what I said above as a personal opinion, but in a legally binding manner. -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.abridgegame.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
