Re: Overview of copyright issues

[Carl Sorensen]

On 9/10/09 4:47 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:

> On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 04:37:46PM -0600, Carl Sorensen wrote:
>> 
>> On 9/10/09 4:02 PM, "Graham Percival" <address@hidden> wrote:
>> 
>>> On Wed, Sep 09, 2009 at 06:04:17PM +0200, Joseph Wakeling wrote:
>>> 
>>> 3)  If we can't find some people, or if they don't agree to
>>> whatever relicense/assignment, then we eliminate their patches and
>>> rewrite that material.
>> 
>> The main reason for having the GPL, IMO, is to prevent somebody from taking
>> the LilyPond codebase and selling a proprietary package.  And v2 seems to do
>> that sufficiently well.
> 
> Yes, but then the FSF went and royally screwed us by making GPLv3
> incompatible with v2.  For an organization that's supposed to
> encourage openness and collaboration, this was MONUMENTALLY
> stupid.  At some point, we'll have to spend hours and hours either
> working around the license, or abandoning working code+docs just
> because it was written 10 years ago under the then-best license
> (i.e. v2).

Amen to that.  If only they had made some kind of an accomodation clause
that would have allowed projects with mixed v2 and v3 licenses to go
forward, as long as the v3 license terms were followed on the combined
package (e.g. no tivoization, and following the patent stuff).  But they
don't.

> 
> Ok, the ghostscript GPLv3 isn't an issue.  But what if guile
> switches to v3?  And what if guile 1.10 or 2.0 or 3.0 (or
> whatever) had some nice bugfixes, runs five times as fast, and
> washes your car as well?  It would suck if we had to ignore all
> those bugfixes (and clean cars) because it was v3 and we couldn't
> link to it.  It would suck slightly less if we had to write some
> wrapper code under v2/v3 to expose the pubic interface or whatever
> it is that people who do this kind of stuff do.  I don't have that
> kind of a hobby.  :)

I guess this means that we should thank Joe for being willing to give this a
shot, and offer whatever help we can to make it come to pass.


Carl