guile-lib licensing (input requested)

guile-lib licensing (input requested)

[Andy Wingo]

Hey hackers,

In an attack of CADT[0], I have decided to move Guile-lib to
savannah.nongnu.org, so that Guile contributors can more easily
contribute to Guile-lib. I've also migrated to Git.

As part of the savannah submission process, Sebastian Gerhardt
rightfully pointed out some schitzophrenia regarding licensing. Many of
our sources come from the public domain, but some of our code is GPL.

We should probably have some kind of policy regarding licenses. Here are
some options that I can think of:

  1) Guile-lib itself has no one license. Individual modules have
     clearly-stated licenses.

     Advantage: reflects the current situation.

     Disadvantage: difficult for the user to know the licenses of the
     software they are using. License of the tarball as a whole is
     ambiguous.

  2) Guile-lib has one license, the GPLv3+.

     Advantage: Clarity, and supportive of software freedom.

     Disadvantage: License is different from that of Guile (LGPLv2+,
     perhaps becoming v3+). Much more restrictive than some
     public-domain sources that we base our work on (e.g. ssax).

  3) One license, the LGPLv3+.

     Advantage: Clarity, harmony with Guile's license.

     Disadvantage: Getting some GPL code relicensed to LGPL, although
     there's not that many contributors for GPL code. A weaker support
     for software freedom.

What do people think?

Btw: until the guile-lib submission goes through, you can get guile-lib
from git as follows:

   git clone http://wingolog.org/git/guile-lib.git

Cheers,

Andy

[0] http://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
-- 
http://wingolog.org/

Re: guile-lib licensing (input requested)

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi!

Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:

> We should probably have some kind of policy regarding licenses. Here are
> some options that I can think of:

I'd say leave PD code PD, and move GPLv2+ files to GPLv3+, with clear
license headers.  (My understanding is that there are currently only PD
and GPLv2+ files, right?)  Top-level `COPYING' can be that of GPLv3+.

Thank you for taking care of this!

Ludo'.

Re: guile-lib licensing (input requested)

[Greg Troxel]

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ludo@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes:

> Hi!
>
> Andy Wingo <wingo@pobox.com> writes:
>
>> We should probably have some kind of policy regarding licenses. Here are
>> some options that I can think of:
>
> I'd say leave PD code PD, and move GPLv2+ files to GPLv3+, with clear
> license headers.  (My understanding is that there are currently only PD
> and GPLv2+ files, right?)  Top-level `COPYING' can be that of GPLv3+.
>
> Thank you for taking care of this!

I was going to say LGPL, but I think a mix of PD and GPLv3+ is fine.  I
see the point of full GPL, but also think that it's good to respect the
earlier intent of those who place things in PD or MIT-style license.

It's not like there will be a horde of companies selling closed-source
derivative copies of guile-lib with extra features...

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