No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah [LWN.net]

No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 22, 2006 20:52 UTC (Wed) by xtifr (subscriber, #143)
In reply to: No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah by alan
Parent article: No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Certainly to understand either side in this matter, you have to be up on the latest political issues. But lets not try to pretend that the politicking is all on the GNU Project's side! Trying to host a GPLv2-only project on Savannah seems like a politically motivated move in the first place.

This guy's a Debian developer. Debian has its own, fairly-well publicized, Sourceforge clone, Alioth. Why would this guy be trying to use Savannah instead of Alioth, unless he was trying to play politics?

How would you feel if a member of the GNU project were complaining because the Debian Project didn't allow hosting a GDFL-licensed, with-invariant-sections project on Alioth?

Or maybe you think the Debian Project (and its members) are above politics? Pardon me, but as a long-time member of the Debian project myself, I just fell out of my chair laughing at the notion. :)

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No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 23, 2006 3:21 UTC (Thu) by joey (subscriber, #328) [Link]

> This guy's a Debian developer. Debian has its own, fairly-well publicized, > Sourceforge clone, Alioth. Why would this guy be trying to use Savannah
> instead of Alioth, unless he was trying to play politics?

In that hypothetical case, before assuming someone was playing politics, I'd think: Maybe he wasn't working on a Debian-related project, thought that Savannah seemed the best place for his project and sent a courtesy post to debian-legal since that list is still mulling over gpl 3 and so has an obvious interest in how quickly the FSF is adopting it?

When I signed up to be a Debian developer, I did not sign up to limit myself to working exclusively on that project, nor did I sign up to be accused of playing politics.

(FYI, Francesco Poli is not a Debian developer, and the project, "markonvert", deals with Fortran, which is not especially relevant to most of Debian.)

No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 23, 2006 20:47 UTC (Thu) by vondo (guest, #256) [Link]

It needn't be politicking at all. I just submitted my project to Savannah because I want hosting somewhere and I want something that I figure will be around for a while and won't try to "upsell" me to something else.

My project happens to be V2 only. Why? V2 does exactly what I want it to. I don't want to let someone eles dictate either more or less free (and you can decide for yourself which category GPL3 fits into) terms that my code can be distributed under. When V3 comes out and I have time to understand the differences, I may check with my other contributors and ask them to go to V3, but there is no way I am going to agree, right now, that *anything* FSF does is OK.

At the moment, it seems that V3 is more restrictive than V2, the the V2 or later clause is fine. But maybe V3 or V4 will introduce some right that I don't want or maybe someone will take my V2 or later code, co-mingle it with V3 code and then distribute it under a V3 license. Maybe I don't want that.

But all that aside, I didn't submit my project with that license to make a political point, as you assume this person did. I did it because I want a nice home for my project.

Eric

No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 24, 2006 9:40 UTC (Fri) by Arker (guest, #14205) [Link]

I can certainly understand where you're coming from, but it honestly seems to me more trouble that way than the other.

If you want to go to GPL v3 later, you need permission from every contributor. Maybe for your project, that isn't tough, but for some it's impossible, and the longer your project runs, the more difficult it gets.

On the other hand, if you use the 'or later' clause, and decide that you don't really like v3 when it comes out, you can move to v2 only license unilaterally. No fuss, no muss. If anyone else wants to, they can fork and continue their own version under v3 too, of course, but would that even really bother you? And even if it would, you have to weigh that against the pain later if you take the first route, and the likelihood of the FSF ever doing anything really evil with the licensing.

No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 23, 2007 15:44 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

On the other hand, if you use the 'or later' clause, and decide that you don't really like v3 when it comes out, you can move to v2 only license unilaterally.

Wrong. That is a change in licensing terms, and must be agreed by everybody involved. Just like the other way around.

No GPLv2-only projects on Savannah

Posted Mar 24, 2007 19:28 UTC (Sat) by liljencrantz (subscriber, #28458) [Link]

No. You are completely within your right to fork a FSF project such as glibc or emacs under GPLv2 only. Bruce Perens tried to make the same claim you did when Busybox moved to GPLv2 only, but he was shot down. Busybox is a pure GPLv2 project today.