about licenses

Rob Landley rob at landley.net
Mon Apr 17 22:46:30 UTC 2006


On Sunday 16 April 2006 7:56 pm, Rich Felker wrote:
> I'm really sick of ignorant people bashing GPL v3. There is nothing in
> it that harms anyone doing legitimate things with the code.

Yes, there is.  Section 5 (c):

> c) If the modified work has interactive user interfaces, each must include a
> convenient feature that displays an appropriate copyright notice, and tells
> the user that there is no warranty for the program (or that you provide a
> warranty), that users may redistribute the modified work under these
> conditions, and how to view a copy of this License together with the central
> list (if any) of other terms in accord with section 7. If the interface
> presents a list of user commands or options, such as a menu, a command to
> display this information must be prominent in the list. Otherwise, the
> modified work must display this information at startup--except in the case
> that the Program has such interactive modes and does not display this
> information at startup.          

If that crap stays in the final draft, then busybox's standalone mode will 
have to bloat each individual applet by upwards of a full kilobyte.  It's 
actually _worse_ than the old BSD advertising clause, we can't afford the 
space, and we simply will not do it.

I tried to inform them, and they didn't care.  If that clause remains in the 
final version, busybox will become GPL v2 only.  Just like the Linux kernel.

However, I'm not going to panic just because the draft is flawed.

> If you 
> don't like it you're free to leave your code under "GPL v2 or later"
> rather than "GPL v3 or later" once GPL v3 is released, but restricting
> to GPL v2 only just hurts the ability of people to use your code for
> legitimate purposes.

If somebody wants to write gpl v2 only code, I'm quite happy with that.  
Whether or not I'd merge it into busybox is a separate issue.  It doesn't 
hurt anybody, as far as I'm concerned.

However it plays out, GPLv3 is going to fork the GPL into incompatible 
versions.  The "or later" hack in the permission notice does not provide 100% 
coverage, and never will.  The only way to avoid that is to never use GPLv3 
for anything, which seem sunlikely.

Then again, there are plenty of other licenses that aren't compatible with the 
GPL, either...

> Rich

Rob
-- 
Never bet against the cheap plastic solution.



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