[darcs-users] how to redistribute darcs+Eclipse

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

Executive summary:

Been there, done that, and based on my experience, David, I hope you
will carefully consider gathering assignments---it's easier to
establish such a policy at this stage than it will be in a year or
so---but also think carefully about whether the case at hand needs to
exercise the power to make an exception.

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Zander <zander at kde.org> writes:

    >> I'm thinking that perhaps the best option would be to ask
    >> authors to assign copyright to me.  I didn't want to do this,
    >> but it would definitely simplify future changes of license.

    Thomas> Why would authors want to give you copyright if the sole
    Thomas> reason for doing so is to ease license change?

Because easing license change is really, really important to reuse.

I've had to break promises about incorporating software in XEmacs
because I later discovered the licenses were incompatible.  I've had
to abandon my own projects because the licenses were incompatible.
And guess what?  _All of the relevant licenses were written by
Stallman and Moglen._ And Stallman (reasonably enough) refuses to make
an exception even to make derivatives of FSF-owned sources compatible
with mostly FSF-owned sources derived from past versions of the same
sources under licenses strongly promoted by the FSF in the past that
can't be relicensed because it's community-owned.

It can happen here, too.  The FSF's number one priority is promotion
of free software, and it won't gratuitously harm existing projects.
But its main vehicle is (the FSF-owned portion of) the GNU system, and
it does not hesitate to incorporate controversial changes to licensing
policy when it believes that is best for the GNU system and by
extension a good thing for free software.  It is quite possible that
GPL v3 or v4 will contain provisions that darcs leaders can't
stomach---you don't need to look farther than the Debian vs. GFDL flap
for recent history of that.

Other possibilities: A fork seems unlikely now, but who knows?  The
next version of the GFDL could turn out to be a much more attractive
license, and David wishes to switch to it for the documentation.  Or
some smart lawyer named Larry will come up with a copyleft license
that manages to be compatible with other copyleft licenses and David
wants to adopt that.

Or David wants to merge most of darcs with most of another application
that has a perfectly acceptable license that is gratuitously
incompatible with the GPL, and that app is also stuck with its
license because it's community-owned (or owned by some institution as
strong-willed as the FSF about licensing).

Regarding the Eclipse plugin, I agree with your analysis of Zooko's
claims.  I don't think there's any good reason so far to make special
exceptions for Eclipse plugins.  Either the plugin links to both GPL
code and CPL code and is illegal to distribute even by itself
(according to the FSF's arguments in the Aladdin Ghostscript +
readline case, never brought to court), or it doesn't and it would be
legal to distribute the aggregation (which seems to be the case, since
a vanilla darcs executable will do).

-- 
School of Systems and Information Engineering http://turnbull.sk.tsukuba.ac.jp
University of Tsukuba                    Tennodai 1-1-1 Tsukuba 305-8573 JAPAN
               Ask not how you can "do" free software business;
              ask what your business can "do for" free software.