Forum OpenACS Improvement Proposals (TIPs): Re: TIP #58 (Proposed): Add license value to package metadata

I think it's not really sensible to put something in to CVS with a GPL compatible license, since the first person who commits changes, retains copyright on those changes, and says their changes are only GPL licensed (which with a GPL compatible license is perfectly allowable and reasonable) coerces the license on the package to GPL.

You can fork any GPL compatible licensed code to a GPL licensed version in this way, which is the essence of what it means to be "GPL Compatible" and consequently I think in the interest of simplicity we should dispense with the pretext of allowing "GPL compatible" licenses in CVS.

If we did want to support alternate licenses in the code, we would probably have to have some way of having people formally accept that their changes fall under the compatible license. As it stands we probably should have people with commit sign something which says that and code or changes they commit are GPL licensed and possibly a "copyright disclaimer" (as mentioned in the GPL). See the Zope Contributor Agreement or the Mozilla contributor form for what something like this might look like.

Anyway, I don't want to be too pedantic about this license stuff, but I think we should get it right.

Approved