Re: GPL v3? Other license options?

[John Locke <..hidden..>]

Hi,

Joshua D. Drake wrote:
> Hello,
>
> As a core member, if it were up to me, we would ditch GPL all together.
> I don't subscribe to the ideology present within it nor do I drink RMS
> brand kool aid.

I'm not a core member, but as a commercial open source company we've
thought about this issue quite a bit.
>
> Does that mean that I am anti FOSS software? Hardly, in fact you would
> be hard pressed to find a larger advocate. What is does mean, is that I
> am a realist and I am pragmatic about it. Software is just a tool. It is
> not a political fight. Nor is software or the "right" to use software or
> see the code an actual "right". That is a fallacy invented by RMS.

I would suggest this puts you squarely in the "open source" camp, rather
than the "free software" camp ;-)  That's probably true of most of us
making a living from free software...

>
> If it were up to me and it isn't entirely. We would use either the LGPL
> (version 2) or the OSL:
>
> http://www.opensource.org/licenses/osl-3.0.php

Huh. I hadn't seen that one before. But that's an interesting
position--to me, the OSL looks like a simplified version of the GPL,
whereas the LGPL is substantially different in that it allows people to
make derivative works that are no longer free or open source.

I would tend to trust that the GPL (at least v2) would hold up in court
better than the OSL, simply because it's got a lot more people
supporting it. An attack on the GPL would surely be easy to gather
allies and resources to help defend. Otherwise I don't see a substantial
difference.

As a commercial company, I prefer releasing code under the GPL instead
of the LGPL (or the Apache or the BSD licenses, etc), simply because it
prevents competitors from taking my code, extending it, and
commercializing it without distributing their enhancements. The GPL
keeps the playing field level, prevents my code from being unfairly used
against me. As far as which version, I don't know enough about v3 to
make an informed decision, so we're sticking to v2 for the time being.

But most of this is an academic discussion--until all the legacy code is
gone, I don't believe the project has the right to change to any other
license. I do see in the last SQL-Ledger distribution on my server
(2.6.23) that the code is released under version 2 or later, so moving
to v3 is an option if this is the same licensing terms as the version
you started the fork from. As long as the project can be considered a
derivative work, I don't think it can use any other license.

Cheers,

-- 
John Locke
"Open Source Solutions for Small Business Problems"
published by Charles River Media, June 2004
http://www.freelock.com