Re: [Notion-devel] A git repo with ion/notion sources

[Arnout E. <no...@bz...>]

On Fri, Aug 27, 2010 at 12:04:32AM +0300, Nedko Arnaudov wrote:
> I personally think it is not worth to try to grow notion in a tainted
> soil. Even if FSF replies that it is safe to use the latest codebase
> after name change, it has yet to be proven in a court. And even then the
> law depends on country.

I don't have many fears: afaics, there are 3 groups of stakeholders here, and
we're safe from all of them if we stick to our plan of dual-licensing all 
contributions under both the LGPL and the ION license:

- Tuomo: we can honour his license without much problems - all the 'funky' 
  terms and conditions only apply when the product is presented under the
  'Ion' name, which we don't.

- Contributors: by asking contributors to contribute their code dual-licensed
  under the ION license and the LGPL, they can't object to their code being 
  incorporated in a product released under either of those.

- The FSF: There is some fear the FSF, as the copyright holder for the LGPL,
  could object to us the ION license being a 'modified' LGPL license. The FSF
  can confirm whether they think this is a problem for them - unlikely imho.

> I do understand that there are people who think otherwise. So I propose
> to let the evolution do its job by allowing both codebases to exist.

Agreed.

> If newer source snapshots are commited over the commit
> 9d93ba723a3acf0a14be347a75dada8df972e97a, and are are dual licensed,
> then they could even be backported to the pristine land.

Also, as we're asking our contributors to dual-license their contributions
under LGPL and ION license, you can cherry-pick those contributions you lika
(and do not depend on ION-licensed constructs).

> In this codebase, the ion name can be kept because it is pure LGPL but
> still I think it is a good idea to change the name. I like the notion
> name and probably it could be possible to have two codebases associated
> with same project.

I think giving both the 'picking up where ion changed licenses' fork and the
'picking up where ion3 left off' fork 'notion' *might* be confusing.

Perhaps the distinction could be made by having a 'notion1' (the LGPL fork) 
and a 'notion2' (the ION-licensed fork), though I always found this kind of 
thing mighty confusing in Jack ;).


Arnout