On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 3:55 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: > The GPLv3 is not more restrictive. > > As I mentioned, if anything it’s more permissive, since it is compatible with > more licenses, and because it allows distributors to add some certain > additional clauses to the license at their discretion.
Our code is "GPLv2 or later", which is the functional equivalent of being multi-licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and all later versions of the GPL) Therefore, the set of licenses that "GPLv2 or later" is compatible with is a strict superset of the licenses that "GPLv3 or later" is compatible with. > If a developer wants to release their personal code under the Apache 2.0 > license, they can do so and still contribute to MediaWiki. Or if a > distributor wants to offer their own warranty on MediaWiki, they can. > > Maybe it was a little presumptuous of me to bring up AGPL, because I’ll admit > I even have bad feelings about it, especially considering the whole security > patch issue. > > However, if somebody would like to offer up an actual reason for why > upgrading from v2 to v3 is a bad idea, I’m all ears. Two responses: 1. Because that makes our code incompatible with any GPLv2-only code out there. 2. Why is it a good idea? In general, our licensing choices should be driven by goals, and it's unclear what goals are met by moving to GPLv3. It's also unclear what goals any version of the GPL is actually serving in this particular context (due to the nature of PHP server side code) but relicensing MediaWiki at this late stage (beyond v2->later version) is not really a practical option, so I don't feel the need to belabor this particular point. > (Also, some relevant links, it seems RESTBase is currently under AGPL, so we > may eventually be enveloped by it anyway: > https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T78212.) That decision isn't final, and in fact, as Gabriel noted on that bug, he's working with the other contributors to relicense it under the Apache 2.0 license, per a conversation that a bunch of us had at WMF. In general, we should think about what goal we're trying to address by using GPLv2+ or GPLv3+ or any other license for that matter. My personal experience has been that any contribution that has been compelled by license rather than given of enlightened self interest is done grudgingly and in a rather useless fashion. There are certainly copyleft success stories (e.g. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt>), but for MediaWiki, it's unclear under what possible scenario we'd want to compel GPL compliance from anyone that wasn't already motivated to work with us as an upstream. In general, I believe we should move more of our licensing toward Apache 2.0. It seems to provide a nice tradeoff between simplicity and providing some basic legal protections for the projects. Rob _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
