New poll: how about licensing models?
On a regular basis we add, code and fix stuff in the L2J code and in a not so regular basis we allow the most skilled team workers and programmers from all around the globe to join the team and make the earth tremble with commit and design proposals. But on an hourly basis (to say something) dozens of persons have access to our source code in a way or another.
So, there’s another issue that requires also knowledge and attention, and it is the way we offer our results to the big public. So many times you perhaps argued on IRC or forums about what the GPL license allowed another people to do or not to do. Now, are you so sure you were right? Is the legal neuron-set of you informed enough to provide an educated opinnion about today’s poll?
I hope you’d wish to read before you cast a vote like everytime you sign any legal thingy. You’d be redefining the way your work is contacting the world, so take it seriously and please feel free to discuss and provide further reading resources. I’ll leave just some wiki links as your starting point:
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One of the main differences that I noticed between GPL2 and GPL3 is that GPL2 is this:
a GPL2 project demands that all modifications comply with GPL2 and are not further restricted in any way. This in turn means that code covered by a less restrictive license may also be used within this program, but more code covered by more restrictive licenses (which will in part impose restrictions to the overall project) will violate GPL2.
Affero contains some restrictions in addition to GPL2 and thus programs or parts of programs or modified versions of code from projects covered under the Affero license cannot legally be used with programs under GPL2.
In GPL3, there is an additional clause which provisions ways by which products code by Affero may be used within code covered by GPL3 and vice versa.
To me, this difference is quite significant. For example, suppose that one day we find an open source project (something totally independent of L2J) with all kinds of stuff related to networking. In there, we discover that their method contains several nice optimizations which could be applied in L2J code. However, we notice that they are covered by Affero license, therefore usage of their code would demand redistribution under Affero and thus would contradict with parts of the GPL2 license…heh, too bad! We have a nice, opensource implementation that we cannot use!!!
With GPL3, the usage and distribution of that Affero-covered code will be plausible (although some conditions do apply). All in all, this will allow us to use more open source resources, so it seems like a good reason to update.
I’m not too hot about switching to Affero, not because I find it bad, but primarily because it’s too different.
Also, I am unsure about how the change of license would affect forks. Namely, if we change our license are all the forks forced to update theirs to match the license of the original? If they are not forced to change, then what will happen is this:
Meanwhile, we will also not be able to copy back parts of their code into our project (unless there is a special ruling about “changing licenses” for the “original owner”). Overall, switching to Affero just leaves more legal questions that may get complex. Simply updating the GPL2 to GPL3 seems a lot easier and still allows usage of affero work (plus an optional clause which adds affero restrictions to GPL distributions).
Some forks will also change their license to match ours…no problems there.
Forks that choose keep the GPL and still synchronize with us will be breaking the license agreement. That is, their GPL will be imposing constraints to our Affero terms, and thus they will not be obaying our new license. We will be able to sue them
I dont see much point in Affero as it looks like trading 6 for 12/2.
I just wanted to point that on L2J is already v3, as our README.txt and the Java Sources uses the v2 or any later version.
So ones is free to use L2J either by v2 or by v3 at his discretion.
from README.txt same can be found on source classes as its project default:
====================
II. LEGAL
====================
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
the Free Software Foundation; either version 2, or (at your option)
any later version.