Re: [Libcdio-devel] GPLv3?

[Burkhard Plaum]

Hi,

>     Huh?
>
> All I knew about libcdio's potential license update was what was in the
> thread and what Rocky had told me.  I hadn't seen mplayer mentioned
> before this.
>
>     - MPlayer is GPL-v2 only and uses libcdio
>
> According to http://www.mplayerhq.hu/DOCS/HTML/en/index.html,
> mplayer is GPLv2 or later.  And while I did not check every one of the
> 1100+ source files, the ones I checked all were GPLv2+.
>
> Why do you say it is GPLv2 only?  Have the mplayer developers made an
> announcement somewhere that it is released under GPLv2-only, not GPLv2
> or later?

Yes, here:
http://www.mplayerhq.hu/design7/info.html

"MPlayer is available under the GNU General Public License version 2. It
is not available under any other licensing terms. If you have questions
about the GNU GPL, consult the GPL FAQ."

If it's true, that it's GPL-v2+ (and the above statement is wrong),
everything is solved for me, and you can go ahead and make the v3 update.

[...]
> You write as if it were a mere oversight that it isn't compatible.

But not intentionally. I know that the FSF-people think hard, before they
publish a new license.

> It
> was fundamentally impossible to do that (unfortunately).  rms would have
> made it compatible if there was a way to do so.  See the beginning of
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/rms-why-gplv3.html.

I understand the theory mentioned in the article, but the practice can end
up with lots of developers having to either

- Remove all code they took from projects with a now incompatible GPL
  replacing it with own implementations (wasting a lot of time) or

- Trying to convince all other projects they took code from to change
  to a compatible GPL (wasting probably even more time).

...and everything because of a License, which mentions the word "freedom"
so often ;) If you look, how many functions are copied & pasted across 100s
of projects, you'll see a huge mess of potential conflicts.

But as I said, if the conflicts I mentioned turn out out to be resolved,
I'm ok with a license change.

> Therefore IMO GPL-v2+ is the only option for libcdio.
>
> That is certainly not the case.  There is always a choice.  Each choice
> has consequences, for sure.

E.g. what I wrote above :)

>     because AFAIK dynamic loading requires licenses to be compatible
>
> This blanket statement is not correct.  It depends on the details of how
> the plugins operate.
> http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#GPLAndPlugins (and subsequent
> questions, depending on whether the base program or the plugin are
> GPL'd/nonfree).

Ahh, didn't know that fork()/exec() mechanisms are also called "plugins".
When I say "plugin", I (and many others) mean dlopen()ed modules, for
which this blanket statement indeed applies.

Burkhard