I'm surprised this was passed over so lightly. The text that Yuri quoted from the Terms of Service means that users grant gitorious a sublicense to the content. And yet, most of the free software licenses prohibit sublicensing. This is a pretty glaring conflict, given the huge amount of GPL code present on gitorious. E.g., GPLv3 states this explicitly at the end of Section 2. Sublicensing is not allowed; section 10 makes it unnecessary. http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html
Essentially you are trying to claim in your Terms of Service that no matter what original license applied to a particular project, you are completely ignoring it and imposing your own license thereafter. The GPL explicitly forbids this. I have just now been forced to remove all of my OpenLDAP repos because the OpenLDAP Public License also forbids this. How can such a license-unfriendly ToS have gone unnoticed for all this time? ---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: Yuri Takhteyev <[email protected]> Date: May 9 2009, 5:27 pm Subject: [ANNOUNCE] Brand new improved gitorious.org! To: Gitorious Perhaps. It's a complicated license and I probably should read it a lot more carefully before making comments about it, but after a quick reading "world-wide, perpetual, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, modify, adapt and publish" doesn't sound like a fun proposition when combined with an indemnity clause. To me this reads like "we can change and redistribute your code forever, but if someone sues us over this, you pay our legal fees". Just to make it clear, I am not a lawyer, and my reading of the license may be totally off. I understand your need to protect yourself and Shortcut, but I agree with Jason that when introducing a new click-through TOS, it is good to give a little warning, so that people have time to read the newterms, to think whether they can sign up for suchterms, and to plan for a migration if they do not. On the other hand, Jason: you can always just pull your data with git and push it to your favorite alternativeservice. -- To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]
