[kde-community] Request to join the Kde incubator for GCompris

[Laszlo Papp]

On Thu, Feb 13, 2014 at 8:59 PM, Aaron J. Seigo <aseigo at kde.org> wrote:
> On Thursday, February 13, 2014 20:32:36 Laszlo Papp wrote:
>> Based on what I heard about GPLv3, for my personal projects, it is a
>> big no-no, and I would not like to see it introduced in my current
>> understanding. It has some serious shortcomings, and also the main
>> reason why Landley left busybox after six years of work.
>
> It has shortcomings if you are in the device industry or relying on DRM.
> Details can be found here:
>
>         http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html
>
> For the general application space, however, it's not a big deal.

OK, that differs from my current understanding, so I will try to
summarize my opinion in case it is simpler for people than looking up
the drama around GPLv3 with Landley and busybox.

* Before GPLv3, GPLv2 was a commercial friendly license. As far as I
know GPLv3 made it untenable.

* You  cannot go back to GPLv2 freely.

* You already mentioned the sharing yourself. I will give you a
practical example: Linux and Samba cannot share code for implementing
two ends of the same protocol.

* One could ask LGPLv3+ in the future (someone consistently after this
request), but that is a weird license. You cannot link GPLv2 code
against LGPLv3 because the convertability is only to v3, not v2.  That
means if glibc went LGPLv3, you could not distribute a gplv2 binary
linked against it. (This is why they have not done it yet, but they
keep "threatening" to...).

I gave some indication about Landley (who is a well respected person
in Linux and other open source circles), but here go some inline urls:

- http://www.landley.net/toybox/oldlicense.html
- http://lwn.net/Articles/202110/

There are more among these lines. I am personally not happy with where
FSF went with this.

>
> --
> Aaron J. Seigo
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