I have now read the text of at least a dozen licenses, and let me tell you, they are quite the boring read.
After the discussion that we have had here, I think that it would be foolish to continue to allow Apple to distribute Wesnoth on the app store as we are. Let me finish before you judge my position. I think that we have basically acknowledged the fact that we will have to remove any code contributed by someone who opposes the possible GPL violation. If we merely did that and continued on, any future contributors (and actually even current and past contributors) would have that same power over their contribution that they could enforce at any time. It would be a ridiculous situation. Our position would also be at the whim of Apple, who have been known to change their terms to be more restrictive. Also, note that even if DarthFool and others are correct that the distribution does not violate the GPL, it seems it will take only a single complaint from a past contributor to Apple to get Wesnoth removed from the app store. Apple seems to have no intention of defending its distribution of GPL apps. To recap, I believe that there have been five suggestions going forward. 1. Change nothing. 2. Stop distributing wesnoth on the app store. 3. Remove code from past contributors who want to enforce their rights. Continue distribution as before. 4. Do 3, but also add some exception to the license. 5. Do 3, but also change the license to something more permissive. I think that most of us know that 1 is not a reasonable solution. I have argued above against 3. From my previous posts, it may seem that I am in support of 2, but I am not, I think that Wesnoth's distribution on the app store would be more positive than negative if it weren't for the license violation (I also don't approve of supporting such a restrictive platform, but the positives outweigh that). As for suggestion 4, I see a couple problems with this. First, the GPL is a fairly restrictive license and I wouldn't feel comfortable with us adding a homegrown exception to the license. If we could find a vetted exception used elsewhere, I would be more comfortable. Also, I do not like the idea of an exception that will primarily benefit only a single developer (i.e. Kyle) or a single platform. Honestly, I think suggestion 2 and suggestion 5 are the most reasonable approaches going forward. Above I have said that I am against suggestion 2, so let me now expand on suggestion 5. This also gets into why I spent hours reading up on different licenses. I agree with Chris Carpenter that the Apache license or a BSD-like license is not nearly restrictive enough. That does not mean there is no such license that fits what we want. After researching the various licenses I would personally suggest that everybody look into both the CDDL and the Mozilla Public License (see links below). These licenses are very similar to each other and I'll give a quick summary. Binary distribution is allowed under any licensing terms as long as source code for that distribution is available under the terms of the CDDL (or MPL respectively). This is the perfect fit for distribution on the app store. Also, I think it better represents the expectations of the license of all the people here who are arguing in favor of app store distribution (and of many others). That is, it requires that the source code remain open and freely licensed. As I have said before, I, personally, think that this is the most important thing. Though both of these licenses are GPL-incompatible, the MPL has an explicit allowance for multiple-licensing such as is done by Firefox which is tri-licensed under MPL, GPL, and LGPL. With such a multi-licensing scheme, you need only accept whichever license they want. Such licensing would allow Wesnoth to remain GPL-compatible. -Chris Hopman CDDL: http://www.sun.com/cddl/cddl.html MPL (annotated): http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1-annotated.html
_______________________________________________ Wesnoth-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/wesnoth-dev
