On Apr 14, 2011, at 3:41 AM, Brian Gupta wrote:
> Congratulations on this long awaited and momentous release. As a community
> member that "would prefer we stay on a GPLv2 or later license.", I have
> severe mixed feelings.
>
> On one hand I strongly respect all the work and code you (and your team) have
> constituted to the community. On the other, I have no idea why you are
> forking this project. GPL represents the "give and others will give back"
> philosophy that I understood that the puppet community epitomized.
>
> Please explain why you are changing the "give and others will give back"
> policy that GPL represents?
Hi Brian,
I've significantly trimmed the list of addressees - if you'd like me to
interact with lawyers from the FSF or whatever, please contact me separately.
There are three ways to talk about this, so I'll take them easiest to hardest.
First, calling this release a 'fork' is silly for so many reasons. I understand
you were doing it just to lay claim to the idea that a relicensing constitutes
a fork, but of course, I've got a fork of the repo in my github account, as
does nearly every contributor. In the end, the 'main' repo is the one that
everyone continues to use, and regardless of license, I'm confident that
everyone will continue to use our public repo on github.
Second, we've been talking about this literally for years, and I've always said
that a big part of why we got CLAs was so that we could do this relicensing.
You and I have talked about it multiple times, in fact, so it's not like this
is a surprise to you. It's obvious that you don't like our decision, but this
kind of grandstanding 2 years into the process isn't going to have much impact.
Third, we obviously think that the Apache license is a better fit for our
project. Can you point to any projects that are released under an open source
license because Puppet was GPL'd? I can't. What I can do, however, is point
to projects that we don't integrate all that well with because the barrier of
integration is higher for us. Even worse, I can point to lots of people who
are scared to redistribute Puppet in ways I particularly want to see happen
because of the GPL.
I've always been honest about why I produce free software - I think it's the
best way to accomplish my goals. It just so happens that Apache is a better
license to use to accomplish those goals than GPL is, at least at this point,
but Apache is just as free as GPL is, and in many ways I think it's more free -
anyone can use it in any way they want. Given that I want Puppet installed on
every computer and every device pretty much everywhere in the world, that's
pretty important to me.
I'm willing to continue having this debate in public if I must, but you seem to
be one of very few people who find it interesting, so I'd prefer to take it
offline if you're willing. I'll also be in NYC in a month and I'm glad to talk
it out over a beer or something then.
--
What's the good of having mastery over cosmic balance and knowing the
secrets of fate if you can't blow something up?
-- Terry Pratchett, "Reaper Man"
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Luke Kanies -|- http://puppetlabs.com -|- http://about.me/lak
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Puppet Users" group.
To post to this group, send email to puppet-users@googlegroups.com.
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
puppet-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/puppet-users?hl=en.
