On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 05:09:32PM -0300, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > Dear David Roundy and all other darcs copyright holders: > > Please act now, before the situation gets more complicated or staler. > Please publically state that you allow GPL'ed darcs source code to be > mixed with IBM Common Public License code. Remember, this is not going > to allow people to use darcs in a proprietary project. The only thing it > is going to do is to allow people in the future to mix darcs code with > CPL'ed projects such as Eclipse.
I've read over the CPL (http://www.eclipse.org/legal/cpl-v10.html), and have no objection to dual-licensing darcs. The CPL is indeed quite similar in spirit to the GPL. I don't see any loopholes, and I suspect the IBM lawyers put some thought into making it enforceable. On the other hand, this isn't a high priority for me. And item #19 of the FAQ: If I write a module to add to a Program licensed under the CPL and distribute the object code of the module along with the rest of the Program, must I make the source code to my module available in accordance with the terms of the CPL? No, as long as the module is not a derivative work of the Program. suggests that there is a loophole, since one could create a proprietary module that gives "extra" features and distribute this together with the CPLed program, as long as the module is not a derivative work. I guess this is related to the fact that the CPL is shorter than the GPL and is less specific about what constitutes legal distribution. In any case, it does seem like a loophole that effectively allows proprietary derivatives to be created--with the restriction being that they'd have to isolate the proprietary code in a module, and somehow keep it from becoming a "derivative work" (whatever that means). I'm also not really clear as to why this is an important issue. What sort of eclipse interface would you imagine that would need to be more closely integrated with darcs than the current interface allows? Also, since the CPL (according to FAQ #19 quoted above) allows non-CPL modules, why couldn't a hypothetical darcs eclipse plugin be licensed under the GPL? In summary, if you (or anyone else) wanted to contact all the darcs contributors to get agreement to dual-license darcs under both GPL and CPL, I'd agree. But it's not something that greatly interests me, and I'm not going to go to the trouble myself. Also note that we can have separate license headers on each file, so one could go through the history of each file and update their licenses separately, although you'd have to be careful about code that might have been copied from one file to another. A hypothetical eclipse plugin probably wouldn't use most of the code in darcs, and the number of contributors to the Patch* modules, for example, is much less than the number of contributors to the interface portions of the code. One could also reduce the effort by dual licensing only the code portion (not the literate documentation) of the files. -- David Roundy http://www.darcs.net _______________________________________________ darcs-users mailing list [email protected] http://www.abridgegame.org/mailman/listinfo/darcs-users
