On 21/05/13 04:27, Richard Fontana wrote:
Probably not *too* much of a problem, and I think a nice political
solution. The inspiration here is the 'Rule of Two' that the Software
Freedom Conservancy is said to use in judging the membership fitness
for potential member projects.
This Rule of Two?
http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Rule_of_Two
If not, which? :-)
The best alternative would be to have a small list of acceptable
licenses, an expansion of the former approach taken with the Apache
License 2.0. Given the tendency in modern code towards use of standard
licenses this might be an okay approach (somewhat reminiscent of the
MySQL "FLOSS license exception").
I am (cautiously, bearing in mind Luis' point) in favour of this, as a
mechanism to promote best-practice modern licenses.
So I think in this situation what we have is an ineffective attempt
to
use the outbound GPL licensing mechanism. There's still no problem,
because the end result is that D is partially copyleft-next and
partially EPL, no incompatibility (we assume on the EPL side as well
as the copyleft-next side).
However, it shouldn't have taken this much text to explain why this is
so. So maybe there's something that can be made clearer. I have a
feeling that there's something in sections 3 and 4 that can be
compressed into one section (much like the outbound GPL compatibility
was formerly in a separate section). I don't think there's a
fundamental problem, unless I am overlooking something important in
your example. (Your example included an additional distribution step,
but I wasn't sure if that was relevant.)
Well, if I say to you "here's D (M + E) under GPL", I may be wrong about
the applicable license, but I haven't necessarily violated the rights of
the copyright holder of E, because there do exist legal ways for me to
distribute M + E to you. However, if the only rights I've explicitly
given you to M are GPL rights, and you further distribute D (M + E) to
others, you can only do so under the GPL, and so you will be violating
the license of E. And you probably won't know you've done it, either -
you are just passing on what I gave you under the license I told you it
was under!
Can't something similar happen with MPL 2.0? Say I have a
'Larger
Work' consisting of an MPL 2.0 part and an EPL part.
Yes - the concrete example is that if you include Apache-licensed code
into your MPL 2 work, you can't then incorporate the result into a GPL 2
larger work (if you follow the FSF line on Apache/GPL 2
incompatibility). This isn't ideal, but then nothing about that alleged
incompatibility is :-|
Additional question: non-copyleft licenses don't require the provision
of source. If I send you a distribution which is mostly copyleft-next
but contains a BSDed library, and send you only the binaries of the
BSDed part, and say "here's the binary; it's under the BSD licence",
that would be "Distribut[ing] a Covered Work incorporating material
governed by a license that is both OSI-Approved and FSF-Free as of the
release date of this License, provided that Your Distribution complies
with such other license", but you still wouldn't have the source...
Gerv