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Who is doing harm here?Who is doing harm here?Posted Oct 2, 2006 8:34 UTC (Mon) by dlang (✭ supporter ✭, #313)In reply to: Who is doing harm here? by atai Parent article: Busy busy busybox
you want greater license compatability by creating a license that's incompatable with all the existing GPLv2 code???!!?!?!?
you are asuuming that all the people who licensed code as GPLv2 or later are going to be willing to change that to GPLv3 or later.
if they want to stick to the GPLv2 or later then they have to live with the license compatability limitations of GPLv2
as documented elsewhere in this thread, this opens the possibility of a three way fork of a project
fork 1
with these three forks the only code 'shareing' that could be done is that fork 2 could get code from fork3. any other shareing would involve the author needing to authorize a license change.
yes fork2 can also take code from projects with more licenses, but those other projects can't take code back from the GPLv3 project without changeing the license of their own code (and if they wanted to do that they could anyway, without needing this 'compatable GPLv3 license' simply by relicensing their code
so exactly how is this 'improved license compatability' supposed to improve code shareing between projects? everything looks one-way to me.
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Who is doing harm here? Posted Oct 2, 2006 20:44 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] you want greater license compatability by creating a license that's incompatable with all the existing GPLv2 code???!!?!?!? The poster was obviously referring to section 7 of the GPLv3, which makes the new GPL compatible with more licenses than the old GPL, most notably the new Apache license. Anyone who made their code "v2 only" knew that they would be incompatible with future GPL versions, just as GPLv2 was incompatible with GPLv1. I fail to see how you can criticize the FSF for something that was impossible to avoid without freezing the GPL forever at v2. And the history of free software is rife with FUD about forking that hasn't lived up to reality (even with licenses like LGPL that theoretically allow legally incompatible forks). Malign forking doesn't happen (in the FLOSS world at least) unless the project already has serious problems unrelated to licensing.
Who is doing harm here? Posted Oct 2, 2006 21:09 UTC (Mon) by stevenj (guest, #421) [Link] with these three forks the only code 'shareing' that could be done is that fork 2 could get code from fork3. any other shareing would involve the author needing to authorize a license change. By the way, your conclusion is false on the facts. The only code that could not be legally combined in your hypothetical example is that fork 1 ("v2 only") could not share code with fork 2 ("v3 or later"). It would be perfectly legal to combine code from fork 1 ("v2 only") and fork 3 ("v2 or later") or from fork 2 ("v3 or later") and fork 3 ("v2 or later"). There might be social obstacles, but there are no legal obstacles (no legal authorization from the authors is required). Any any hypothetical project whose developers are so divided that they undergo a triple fork has more problems than just licensing.
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