On Jul 13, 2007, Robert Dewar <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > This means getting lawyers involved, and for sure you don't want > them wasting time tracking an 18 month period in which the license > keeps changing.
Yet somehow a number of large stakeholders not only tracked the license development over 18 months, but actually participated and influenced it so as to meet their interests. And they somehow didn't think of it as wasting time. See, I'm not diminishing the importance of licensing issues, I'm just saying it's legally irresponsible to sit back and *not* even watch what's going on in the development of the license that a bunch of software one is very clearly interested in, and then try to frame the moment when the development is completed and the license is to be adopted, as forecast throughout the process and as explicitly permitted by the licensing practice in place for almost two decades, as something unexpected, as a sudden major legal burden. > So you typically would wait till the license change was definite. It seems to me that it would be saner to not only keep up with the developments of the license, but also get one's major customers aware of the upcoming changes, not creating false expectations as to licensing issues. We shouldn't hold back the upgrade just because some vendors *might* have failed to keep up on the legal front. >> Now, why should we weaken our defenses > I am at a loss to understand this rhetoric, all we are talking > about is what version number to use, how does this "weaken > our defenses" (what defenses? against whom?). Some people are advocating that patches be under GPLv2+, to enable earlier releases with backports to remain in GPLv2. Since GPLv2 has weaker defenses for users' freedoms than GPLv3, against those who might wish to impose restrictions on these freedoms, GPLv2-compatible patches would enable backports into more weakly-defended releases. The weaker defenses stem mainly out of uncertainty as to the extent of "no further restrictions". -- Alexandre Oliva http://www.lsd.ic.unicamp.br/~oliva/ FSF Latin America Board Member http://www.fsfla.org/ Red Hat Compiler Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED], gcc.gnu.org} Free Software Evangelist [EMAIL PROTECTED], gnu.org}