Hi all;
Why I favor a wait and see approach:
I have thought long an hard about this. I went through a point where I
thought it might actually be best for us to move to the LGPL. However,
after reading both the LGPL v2.1 and the GPL v3 I do not believe that this
solves our problem. In short, I don't think you can have an LGPL
2.1-onlycomponent used in a GPL v3 component or vice versa under terms
consistant
with either the Corresponding Source definition or the standards of
derivative works.
In short, there seems to be no way to go back to the licensing situation
before the release of the GPL v3...
Personally, I will resist to what extent I feel is reasonable the impulse to
upgrade the license. I do not like the GPL v3 and when we are forced to
make a decision one can expect some resistance if it not obvious tht this is
the best way forward for the project. So while I won't say "never..."
After running around this issue over and over, I think that it is best to
wait and see if we ever have to move. I think we do owe it to our community
to try to approximate the license situation as much as possible relating to
where things were when we started. The ultimate question becomes, is "GPL
v2 or later" closer than "GPL v2 only." I don't have an answer.
Personal views on Software Freedom:
One final note about RMS's "kool aid." A lot of the discussion may come
down to different definitions of this drink. However, I don't believe that
anyone on the core team is just a mindless follower (or mindless opposition)
of any political figure related to this discussion. We probably all have
disagreements with the FSF in some matters and with eachother. This is
healthy :-).
My own view is that the 4 basic freedoms are aspects of an economic and
social good we might call Software Freedom. While not strictly speaking
fundamental rights, they are worth protecting and expanding. Because they
are good from both perspectives, a successful Free Software project will be
successful regardless of the licenses involved (and certainly experience
seems to agree here). While the standards of justification may be slightly
different, code owners have many of the same reasons for contributing to
projects regardless of whether we are talking about BSD or GPL licenses.
One might well look to IBM as an example. Not only do I believe that they
do contribute back to the Apache HTTPD project, but they have contributed
whole projects under the APache 2.0 license which is Free but not Copyleft.
(Arguably IBM's scale and the maturity of Cloudscape/Derby and the
associated user community would have precluded many of the standard concenrs
over permissive licenses, however.)
In short, my major disagreement with the FSF/RMS is simply that copyleft is
fundamentally necessary to preserving Freedom, and that essential software
Freedom must be sacrificed in order to be preserved. I do, however, think
that the GPL v2 did a good job of balancing the copyleft and freedom
components, but I do not think the GPL v3 continues this tradition, and I
think that the Affero GPL forces one to sacrifice essential aspects of
Software Freedom in exchange for the sense of security that one gets from
seeing the source code, so one is tempted to quote Ben Franklin...
Best Wishes,
Chris Travers
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