Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Graham Percival]

On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 04:37:46PM -0600, Carl Sorensen wrote:
> 
> On 9/10/09 4:02 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:
> 
> > On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 06:04:17PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
> > 
> > 3)  If we can't find some people, or if they don't agree to
> > whatever relicense/assignment, then we eliminate their patches and
> > rewrite that material.
> 
> The main reason for having the GPL, IMO, is to prevent somebody from taking
> the LilyPond codebase and selling a proprietary package.  And v2 seems to do
> that sufficiently well.

Yes, but then the FSF went and royally screwed us by making GPLv3
incompatible with v2.  For an organization that's supposed to
encourage openness and collaboration, this was MONUMENTALLY
stupid.  At some point, we'll have to spend hours and hours either
working around the license, or abandoning working code+docs just
because it was written 10 years ago under the then-best license
(i.e. v2).

Ok, the ghostscript GPLv3 isn't an issue.  But what if guile
switches to v3?  And what if guile 1.10 or 2.0 or 3.0 (or
whatever) had some nice bugfixes, runs five times as fast, and
washes your car as well?  It would suck if we had to ignore all
those bugfixes (and clean cars) because it was v3 and we couldn't
link to it.  It would suck slightly less if we had to write some
wrapper code under v2/v3 to expose the pubic interface or whatever
it is that people who do this kind of stuff do.  I don't have that
kind of a hobby.  :)

If it was an incompatibility of BSD-software wanting to use a
GPL-library, there's no contest.  Obviously the BSD-software
either relicenses to GPL, or finds/writes their own library.  But
an incompatibility between GPLv3 and v2 like this is just stupid.
:/

Cheers,
- Graham