[darcs-users] this is not licence advocacy (was: how to redistribute darcs+Eclipse)

[zooko at zooko.com]

Just to be clear: I am not advocating adopting an LGPL-like or a BSD-like
("permissive") license in place of darcs's current GPL licence.  I think there
may be some confusion about this because some other people were advocating such
things in the same thread in which I suggested this compatibility-with-CPL
hack.

As far as I know, the consequences of my proposed hack would be consistent with
the *current* desires of David Roundy and of the other darcs authors.  I am not
attempting to persuade them to change their minds about what license they
desire to use for darcs.

So let us attempt to restart the discussion along these lines from the start.

Dear David Roundy and other darcs contributors:

Suppose that someone wished to create a program using darcs and also using code
under the CPL or EPL licences.  Suppose that this program were released under a
Free Software license, and suppose that the components of the program which
were derived from darcs were under the GPL.  Is it your intention to forbid 
this person to distribute such a program to others?

If it *is* your intention to forbid this hypothetical person from distributing
the resulting program, then you should continue to distribute darcs under the
GPL.  (In fact, perhaps you should remove the "any later version" clause -- as
the Free Software Foundation might someday write a new version of the GPL which
is compatible with the CPL.)

If it is *not* your intention to forbid this hypothetical hacker from
distributing his Free Software project which includes GPL'ed darcs code, then
please add the "CPL/EPL exception clause" to the license.


Legal statement:

As the author of all of the patches with author field "zooko at zooko.com" that
are in the darcs repository, I hereby assign my copyright over those patches to
David Roundy.  I further state that all future patches that I submit to the
darcs project for inclusion are likewise copyright-assigned to David Roundy, 
unless I specifically state otherwise.


Regards,

Zooko