On 30 Mar, Ron Parker wrote:
> The primary asset is the code, correct? If the code is GPL and OSS, then
> the code is forever freely available to the public whether the non-profit
> enterprise disbands or continues to remain an organized effort. I
> assume, this principle is a primary consideration upon which decisions
> to use or not to use Midgard are based on.
You're correct. However, the point here is that the copyright
holder of the software can change the licensing terms whenever
he wishes to. At that point all software that has been released
so far remains under the licensing it has been released under,
but the new releases are done under the new licensing.
Effectively, this would mean a code fork. An example of this
would be if Jukka decided to sell his copyrights to a software
company that would then start making proprietary version of Midgard.
I'd guess that the development team here would continue working
on the GPLd version, and the proprietary version would eventually
start falling back feature-wise. But still, a fork would be
something we'd rather avoid as it has the tendency of causing
incompatibility between versions and needless work (see the Emacs/XEmacs
situation, for example).
Also, the GPL is currently being contested by Mattel in the
cphack lawsuit. If it ends in Mattel's favor, that could be
a nasty precedent against free software. (The case in
nutshell is that Mattel tries to prevent distribution of
old GPLd versions of a program it now owns).
I trust the people on our team to make right decisions, and
so problems like this are highly unlikely for us. But for
companies making strategic choices, that trust might not be
enough, and so it is good to clarify the situation.
> I'm not entirely aware of the licensing for the core libraries. I
> recall there was mention of this by Bergie earlier in this thread. This
> appears to be an appropriate time for Midgard users, such as myself,
> to become accutely aware of all licensing issues.
There are no serious issues there, all the code is being
distributed under standard free software licenses (different
parts of Midgard are either under GPL, LGPL or the MIT license).
The point I had there was that currently Jukka Zitting holds
all copyrights of Midgard, even on the parts written by other
developers. There are some approaches to solving this.
One would be the way Linux kernel is copyrighted. There every
contributor owns the code he has written there. The problem
with this is that changing the license (if GPL begins causing
some problems, for example) would require acceptance from
*all* code contributors, which in case of a big software problems
is quite difficult.
The other approach, which is the one we'll be taking is to
form a nonprofit where all contributors can gain membership
in, and then turn the copyrights to that organization. This
way everybody gets a vote on what is done, but single developer
can't make it impossible for the whole project to make advancements.
I think this is the core of it. If you (or anyone else)
have questions on the licensing, I'll be glad to try answering
them.
> I think it's a fine strategy to assume nonprofit status in order to enable
> monetary and property contributions. The continued growth in Midgard as a
> freely available product is in my interest.
That is the point. It is very important to provide the needed
development infrastructure (Web sites, version controlling,
mailing lists, ...), and that is where we need a supporting
organization. That organization could be a company, but I
feel that a nonprofit would do better with creating a
level playing field for all parties willing to participate
in the project.
> Ron
/Bergie
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-- Henri Bergius -- +358 40 525 1334 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] --
http://www.iki.fi/Henri.Bergius
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