On 26 May 2005, at 13:52, Jesse Ross wrote:
This made me thing of an entirely different issue... what license
are we
releasing everything under? I would assume GPL or LGPL simply
because of
our GNUstep heritage. Would latching onto something like Darwin or
launchd
(both of which are under the APSL) lead to any type of distribution
problems because of licensing? If we're considering maintaining and
distributing an entire system, we really need to make sure we have
this
squared away.
GPL and the APSL are not compatible with each other. This means that
you can not create a product which links code under the two licenses
together. Note, however, that neither license has a clause related
to bundling. You can create a system which bundles both GPL and APSL
code (e.g. a GPL'd kernel and a APSL'd init system) without
problems. The APSL (version 2) is approved by the FSF as a Free
Software license. At first glance, the APSL appears to be `more
free,' since it allows binary-only distribution of derived works (not
particularly relevant to this project).
Note that several of the external projects we are already looking at
are already not GPL'd. I believe Lucene is Apache 2.0 licensed,
PostgreSQL is under the (3-clause) BSDL, and SQLite is public domain.
I would assume that we would be using the LGPL, since it is most
applicable to a library-type system, although components may be GPL'd.
Any code I contribute to the project will be under the 3-clause BSD
license, and so can be used with more or less anything (my concept of
Free Software is closer to Theo de Raadt's than Richard Stallman's).
