Tyler, On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 6:11 PM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com> wrote: > > However, I will not assume good faith for every other software company out > there that may take MediaWiki, modify it or improve it in some way, and > then begin selling it as proprietary software. It's nice to think the world > is an ideal place where everybody shares their source code, but > unfortunately we are not living in the ideal, and in fact that is the > entire reason the GPL was written in the first place: in response to > companies acting in bad faith.
the GPL (any version) doesn't do anything for the most likely scenario of a company offering their 'improved' version of MediaWiki as a service. To actually have real leverage in this case, we'd need to use the AGPL. However, the AGPL would make it even harder to split out code into libraries shared with the wider open source community, as very few third-party users would consider using AGPL-licensed libraries. Even the consequences of using AGPL-licensed network services like RESTBase seem to be less clear than I expected, which is why we are in the process of relicensing the main server code to Apache 2 as well (modules are already Apache licensed). If we were an open core company hoping to sell commercial licenses on FUD I'd advocate for AGPL. Since we aren't & are actually more interested in collaborating with the outside world I think that Apache 2 makes more sense than both GPL & AGPL. Re-licensing MediaWiki is not going to happen any time soon as there are so many copyright holders, but we could try to re-license library code where possible. I also think that we should strongly consider using the Apache 2 license for new projects. Gabriel _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
