On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:50:08 +0100, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Hello folks,
I recently had a few discussions about the license under which Roundcube
is
published. Currently this is GPLv2 and I think it's time to change it.
Therefore I'd like to share some thoughts with you and invite you to
share
your opinions about this topic. For me there are three possible
directions
to go:
To change the licence you will need the agreement of all contributors (since the current Roundcube code is a derivative work of all their contributions).
- Upgrade to GPLv3
I would be happy with version 3 of the GPL.
- Switch to AGPLv3
I think this licence may deter some people from using Roundcube because of the requirement to make source code available to users and therefore may reduce contributions and bug reports.
- Switch to LGPL
I think the LGPL is inappropriate. PHP (which Roundcube is written in) is usually distributed in source form. It makes little sense to have LGPL PHP code.
Regards, Chris
List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/
On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 21:22:40 +0000, Chris January chris@atomice.net wrote:
On Fri, 22 Jan 2010 15:50:08 +0100, Thomas Bruederli wrote:
Hello folks,
I recently had a few discussions about the license under which
Roundcube
is
published. Currently this is GPLv2 and I think it's time to change it.
Therefore I'd like to share some thoughts with you and invite you to
share
your opinions about this topic. For me there are three possible
directions
to go:
To change the licence you will need the agreement of all contributors (since the current Roundcube code is a derivative work of all their contributions).
- Upgrade to GPLv3
I would be happy with version 3 of the GPL.
- Switch to AGPLv3
I think this licence may deter some people from using Roundcube because
of
the requirement to make source code available to users and therefore may reduce contributions and bug reports.
- Switch to LGPL
I think the LGPL is inappropriate. PHP (which Roundcube is written in)
is
usually distributed in source form. It makes little sense to have LGPL
PHP
code.
Regards, Chris
The choices Thomas presented seem like solutions in need of a problem, as they vary wildly in being more (Affero) or less (LGPL) restrictive than the current licence. A licence change should address an actual problem or move towards a larger goal in how RoundCube can be used. If the project members feel that there are limitations in GPL 2.0 that cause problems for RoundCube, these should be discussed to find a licence that meets the criteria. If (hypothetically) the problems are addressed by GPL 3.0, moving to that version of the GPL (or "GPL x.x or any later version") could be considered.
Regardless of whether a licence change occurs in the near future, it would be useful to start compiling contact information for the contributers who hold copyright on the RoundCube codebase to make it easier to include them in licencing decisions. They may also choose to grant their rights to a specific person or entity to make changes possible without consulting them each time (this is a system used by many large projects).
-Albert
PS: Chris, the LGPL is still a copyleft licence, but would allow use of RoundCube in combination with non-free components. Source is always be required to be distributed for the LGPL components, so there is nothing strange from a technical perspective.
Even if RoundCube were licenced under a permissive licence like the MIT licence, so its source could be used for something entirely under a non-free licence, this is still an effective decision if that is what you wanted to allow since the major "freedoms" that copyleft licences enforce are the freedoms to modify and redistribute the source, which would be missing from a non-free licence even if you had access to the source (which as you observed, you almost always do with PHP projects - although Zend bytecode could be distributed as well). _______________________________________________ List info: http://lists.roundcube.net/dev/
-
Albert Lee -
Chris January