> I don't really understand why the push for wanting to relicense > everything that is under the GPL. That's probably because I view the > GPLv2 and GPLv3 (along as the LGPL) as better licenses than the > ISC/MIT/BSDL ones, and the recent discussions following the Atheros > driver issue have only reafirmed that view. So, while I do understand > that each individual developer has a valid opinion, I think that only > half the problems have been presented thus far. For example, recently > in the BSD community the idea that the BSD license is incompatible > with the GPL has been gaining strength. If this is true, BSD code > can't be used in GPL'ed projects, which would mean that the single > corpus of work I can imagine wanting to share code with - GNUstep > proper - wouldn't be able to use the code. This are rumours of course, > but so are the often repeated arguments against the GPLv2 and GPLv3 > found in undeadly.org and that have been cruising all the mailing > lists I'm subscribed to. >
... > o I am in generally open to colaborate with projects that choose other > free licenses (this was especially true before the recent > discussions), and as I said before I honestly want what is deemed the > best for Étoilé > > I can relicense everything I've done under a free, non-copyleft > license like the ISC license if that is what the project wants. It's > not ideal for me, as per above, and if the project official position > is to disallow the GPL and even discourage the LGPL that puts me in a > though spot. I (kind of) started this thread, based on Yen-Ju's questions about certain licenses. I just wanted clarification on what licenses we were using, and to make sure that we could use what code we already had in the most flexible ways possible. I don't think anyone here has any problems with LGPL code in SVN (I know I don't) other than from the standpoint of integrating that code with other code -- ie: if we wanted to then combine that code with Apache or CDDL or MPL code, we're out of luck. With BSD (or MIT) we don't have that problem, hence my push for that license. GPL is the only license we really try to avoid due to the way in which we believe we will be using Etoile -- primarily as components which will be embedded/linked to documents. It's the same reason much of GNUstep itself is under LGPL. The reasoning of using LGPL instead of GPL applies to applications as well, since we're trying to move to a less application-centric model. If we want to convert a chunk of code from an application to an embedded component, and that app is under the GPL, we begin to run into some legal snags. David did a little write-up on that in our Licensing Philosophy here: http:// www.etoile-project.org/etoile/mediawiki/index.php?title=EtoileWiki:About All that said, if any given author wants their code to remain under the original terms, that is entirely within their rights and I would never try to coerce them into a different license. I personally believe that having good contributors who care about the project and who write good code is more important than having everything under a particular license. We can find ways to write around license compatibilities, but we can only do that if we have good developers to begin with. J. _______________________________________________ Etoile-dev mailing list [email protected] https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
