Re: Copyright/licensing action plan + a sample [PATCH]

[Reinhold Kainhofer]

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Am Samstag, 19. September 2009 20:18:14 schrieb Joseph Wakeling:
> > If you really want to keep on doing copyright stuff, then I'd
> > suggest that you look into the licenses of the projects which
> > lilypond *links* to.  Stuff like ghostscript doesn't matter, since
> > we only call it on the command-line.  But it would be good to
> > know, for example, what license guile 1.8 is under, if they
> > changed to GPLv3 when did it happen, etc.
>
> Yes, I think that's a good idea and will start tracking those things.
>
> Guile I think is LGPLv3 although parts may be GPL -- but that's only for
> the current development release (i.e. 1.9.x).  1.8.x is still under
> LGPLv2+.

Ouch. so as soon as a LGPLv3 version of guile comes out, lilypond can't use 
guile any more, because LGPLv3 is not compatible with GPLv2... So, lilypond 
then has to switch to GPLv3... But then we have a problem with freetype, which 
is FTL (BSD with advertising clause, thus incompatible with GPL) or GPLv2 
only... 

I really love it how FSF handles the GPL purely for political reasons... 
(Which might make sense from an abstract viewpoint, but in daily developer 
life that is just counterproductive and hindering productive development!)

To be honest, as an open source developer, I'm really starting disliking the 
GPL, simply for practical reasons.

> > I'm pretty certain that we're fine right now, but as more and more
> > projects switch to GPLv3, we might suddenly discoved that we can't
> > link to pango or freetype or something like that.  It would be
> > great if we had a list of such projects, so that if/when we
> > seriously discover any license switch (again, in a few months) we
> > have that info handy.
>
> That was one of the motivations for tracking who was OK with GPLv2+ --
> to have an advance list of people ready for such an eventuality.

See e.g. what KDE did a while ago:
http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/KDE_Relicensing

I propose we also keep such a list (publicly available) about what the devs 
allow with regards to their licenses.

Cheers,
Reinhold


- -- 
- ------------------------------------------------------------------
Reinhold Kainhofer, address@hidden, http://reinhold.kainhofer.com/
 * Financial & Actuarial Math., Vienna Univ. of Technology, Austria
 * http://www.fam.tuwien.ac.at/, DVR: 0005886
 * LilyPond, Music typesetting, http://www.lilypond.org
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