On Mon, Dec 5, 2011 at 16:33, Georg C. F. Greve greve@kolabsys.com wrote:
On Monday 05 December 2011 15.58:48 Cor Bosman wrote:
I agreed after asking Thomas about the exception and how certain that exception is. If that exception is in any way open for discussion Id be against AGPL. If the exception is legal, then i don't mind AGPL but still prefer GPL just to avoid any uncertainty.
As stated before, that is fine with me.
I'd like to summarize this once again.
The goal of this license upgrade is to clarify the current situation which is somewhat vague and up to interpretation. In order to find the right balance between forcing people to contribute back to the project and allowing non-public/commercial entities to use and extend Roundcube the proposed solution is to use GPLv3 with the initially posted exception. This will have the following effects:
- For the Roundcube core codebase, the rules of GPLv3 apply and
copy-left is enforced
- Unlike AGPL this strong copy-left enforcement only affects projects
which re-distribute Roundcube but doesn't affect modified Roundcube installations which are only provided as a service
- Choosing GPL "version 3 or any later" over GPLv2 opens the doors to
combine Roundcube with components licensed under AGPL or future GPL versions
- With the exception in place, we exclude plugins and skins from being
ruled by the restrictions of the GPL. This should provide enough freedom for commercial entities and developers to create closed-source extensions or to publish their code under any license of their choice.
Finally, as Georg already said, the license is just a piece of text. But I'm convinced that with GPLv3 as a base and the exception written by some trusted law person we're on the safe side and well prepared for the future development of our great project.
Regards, Thomas _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/ BT/aba52c80