On Wed, Jul 25, 2012 at 1:09 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
On Wed, 2012-07-25 at 13:52 +0200, Krzysztof Kosiński wrote:
because some people might want to use Inkscape under GPL v2.
The GPL only applies to you if you are distributing the licensed work, not if you're using it. That's why it's called a copyright license and not a use-it-right license.
And are people really that paranoid about the GPLv3? On reading, it's a good improvement over v2, the only reason why people would be trying to move away from it would be if they'd been infected with some sort of curious meme.
in any case, retaining the four freedoms and maintaining the copyleft are the most important principles; the exact license isn't very important in the grand scheme.
Okay, I should shut up and be doing vacationy stuff, and will start after this...
I talked with Bradley from the SFC and it sounds like as long as all licenses are compatible, the project/releases would become GPLv3 but the "GPLv2 and later" licensed files don't need to change. If people want to use those v2 in other v2 or compatible projects, it's all good. I personally think putting in compile time flags to make it only use v2 code is not worth any core developers time... if a third party (or any project member) feel strongly enough to put something forth a patch or commit, that's all good for them. I just don't know that as a project we'd really want to maintain a compile time flag like that.
Martin, as mentioned in the board thread (which I don't know if you read or not), the freedoms thing is indeed the biggest concern, not the specific license.
It's sounding like now it's just looking to see if there are any files which are explicitly v2 only or otherwise not compatible with v3. I won't have a chance to look into this until after after the 6th. Anyone else that wants to take it one prior to that is more than welcome to (as mentioned though, I was already planning on doing so... even the old fashioned way of looking in every file manually).
Bradley will be contacting the board/committee to discuss things with us. Note: Aside from the freedoms thing and not caring about the license... we also don't want to have the project come across as being ambivalent towards licensing. We're not that paranoid or worried, we just would prefer to have our i's dotted and t's crossed... we are a member organization of the SFC and it's just smart that we utilize their services and get their guidance to ensure we're steering things in the right direction.
Anyway... I hope you all enjoy the next couple weeks and I will be back in contact in the near future.
Cheers, Josh