Re: GPL v3? Other license options?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

Hi all;

Why I favor a wait and see approach:

I have thought long an hard about this.  I went through a point where I thought it might actually be best for us to move to the LGPL.  However, after reading both the LGPL 
v2.1 and the GPL v3 I do not believe that this solves our problem.  In short, I don't think you can have an LGPL 2.1-only component used in a GPL v3 component or vice versa under terms consistant with either the Corresponding Source definition or the standards of derivative works.

In short, there seems to be no way to go back to the licensing situation before the release of the GPL v3...

Personally, I will resist to what extent I feel is reasonable the impulse to upgrade the license.  I do not like the GPL v3 and when we are forced to make a decision one can expect some resistance if it not obvious tht this is the best way forward for the project.  So while I won't say "never..."

After running around this issue over and over, I think that it is best to wait and see if we ever have to move.  I think we do owe it to our community to try to approximate the license situation as much as possible relating to where things were when we started.  The ultimate question becomes, is "GPL v2 or later" closer than "GPL v2 only."  I don't have an answer.


Personal views on Software Freedom:

One final note about RMS's "kool aid."  A lot of the discussion may come down to different definitions of this drink.  However, I don't believe that anyone on the core team is just a mindless follower (or mindless opposition) of any political figure related to this discussion.  We probably all have disagreements with the FSF in some matters and with eachother.  This is healthy :-).

My own view is that the 4 basic freedoms are aspects of an economic and social good we might call Software Freedom.  While not strictly speaking fundamental rights, they are worth protecting and expanding. Because they are good from both perspectives, a successful Free Software project will be successful regardless of the licenses involved (and certainly experience seems to agree here).  While the standards of justification may be slightly different, code owners have many of the same reasons for contributing to projects regardless of whether we are talking about BSD or GPL licenses.  

One might well look to IBM as an example.  Not only do I believe that they do contribute back to the Apache HTTPD project, but they have contributed whole projects under the APache 2.0 license which is Free but not Copyleft.  (Arguably IBM's scale and the maturity of Cloudscape/Derby and the associated user community would have precluded many of the standard concenrs over permissive licenses, however.)

In short, my major disagreement with the FSF/RMS is simply that copyleft is fundamentally necessary to preserving Freedom, and that essential software Freedom must be sacrificed in order to be preserved.  I do, however, think that the GPL v2 did a good job of balancing the copyleft and freedom components, but I do not think the GPL v3 continues this tradition, and I think that the Affero GPL forces one to sacrifice essential aspects of Software Freedom in exchange for the sense of security that one gets from seeing the source code, so one is tempted to quote Ben Franklin...

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers