Hi, I agree with the licensing that John has set out below to apply to my contributions. I'm not bothered which is applied... MIT or GPL.
Andrew On 7/1/07, John-Mark Bell <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Hi, You are receiving this email because our records suggest that you have contributed to the NetSurf project (http://www.netsurf-browser.org) in some way or other in the past. NetSurf's licensing status is currently somewhat messy. Currently, we state the following: "Licensed under the GNU General Public License" There are a number of problems with this: 1) There is no formal statement as to which version of the GPL NetSurf is licensed under (although a copy of GPL version 2 is included in distributed versions). 2) It is unclear whether the end user has been granted the right to relicense the software under future versions of the GPL (i.e. whether the common "...or (at your option) any later version." wording from the standard GPL boilerplate applies), We do not use the standard GPL boilerplate within the source code. 3) In order to provide HTTPS support, NetSurf is linked against OpenSSL. The OpenSSL licence is incompatible with the GPL. See http://www.openssl.org/support/faq.html#LEGAL2 for more details on this. 4) The translatable Messages files, window templates and documentation have no explicit licensing information. 5) There is no explicit licensing of related artwork. Given the above, I propose the following: 1) Formalise GPL version 2 as being the GPL version which NetSurf is licensed under. This may be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html 2) Come to an agreement about whether to permit the user to relicense the software under future GPL versions. For reference, GPL version 3 has been recently released. This may be found at http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html 3) Include a specific exemption to permit linking against OpenSSL. 4) License the Messages files, window templates and documentation under the GPL, as per proposals 1-3. 5) License supporting artwork under either the GPL (as per proposals 1-3) or some less restrictive licence such as MIT (http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php). The rationale for the above is as follows: + There is a move to get the GTK version of NetSurf included in the Debian package repository. To do this requires licensing clarity. The lack of an exemption for linking against OpenSSL will result in immediate rejection of a NetSurf package for Debian. See the top item in the table on http://ftp-master.debian.org/REJECT-FAQ.html and http://www.gnome.org/~markmc/openssl-and-the-gpl.html for further details on this. + OpenSSL is not part of the base OS on RISC OS, either, so an exemption is required on that platform also. + Licensing the documentation, window templates and Messages files in the same way as the rest of the source code would be sensible. All are directly related to the source code and are unlikely to be used elsewhere. + The source code is licensed under the GPL, so using the same licence for the artwork avoids confusion. However, it is unclear as to what the "preferred form of the work for making modifications to it" is in this case. Additionally, it imposes constraints upon those using the artwork (e.g. to illustrate articles on a website). They would have to distribute the preferred source format for the artwork as well as the version used for illustrative purposes, which seems an unnecessary burden. It would, however, mean that any changes that are made by third parties are available in the original format for others to use. Any other licence used for artwork would need to be GPL compatible (else the artwork could not be distributed with the software). This rules out any of the Creative Commons licences, or the Free Art Licence, which would have been the obvious choices. Therefore, I have proposed a simple attribution licence: MIT. [Important note: "Software" does not imply "program", so it's perfectly acceptable to use this licence for artwork] Please direct any replies you may have to the developers' mailing list -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] It is important that replies are received from everyone as, without them, the current situation will remain indefinitely (or until such time as the contributions of non-respondents are removed -- obviously, we'd rather this didn't happen). Therefore, please do respond at your earliest convenience. On proposals 1, 2, and 3, I require replies from the following people, who have contributed code to NetSurf: Kevin Bagust John-Mark Bell James Bursa Matthew Hambley Rob Jackson Rob Kendrick Jeffrey Lee Adrian Lees Phil Mellor Philip Pemberton Vince Sanders Darren Salt Daniel Silverstone Andrew Timmins John Tytgat Chris Williams Richard Wilson On proposals 1, 2, 3, and 4, I require responses from the following people, who have contributed Messages files and documentation: Sebastian Barthel Bruno D'Arcangeli Michael Drake Gerard van Katwijk Jrme Mathevet Simon Voortman On proposal 5 (and 1-3, if applicable), I require responses from the following people, who have contributed artwork: John-Mark Bell Michael Drake Andrew Duffell Richard Hallas Phil Mellor Thanks, John.
