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

[kevin g. <kev...@gm...>]

On Fri, Sep 3, 2010 at 4:07 PM, Arnout Engelen <no...@bz...> wrote:
> 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.

The only thing that really bothers me about Tuomo getting annoyed and
doing bad things to the project (and if you ever read this Tuomo, I
don't expect you in particular to do anything, it's just that I don't
trust anyone) is the trademark on the ion name.  I don't know how it
works in his jurisdiction, but my reading of case law in the US is
pretty clear about embedding a trademarked word in a product name.
But that is the case with all of the proposed options since everyone
seems to like the notion name so much.

>
> - 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.

But they might not want to contribute to a codebase that is under the
ION license.  Personally I don't want to contribute to anything
non-free, even if it is dual-licensed with a free license.

>
> - 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.
>

There is a stakeholder you are skipping, users, and more specifically
distributions.  My primary concern as a user is that the software is
available on whatever distribution I'm using at the moment (I don't
always have time to build from source), and having the license
situation be weird potentially interferes with distribution uptake.

>> 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.

Haha, like either group has a choice :)
Although I think I do understand your intent, which is that there is
no need to argue about it.

>
>> 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).

Even if they do depend on ION-licensed constructs, we should be able
to work around that in most cases, the contribution itself will be
LGPL, and therefore we can modify it as we see fit to work with our
codebase.

>
>> 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.

The trademark on the ion name is also an issue regardless of the
license, and I think changing to notion is at least slightly better
than sticking with ion.

>
> 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 ;).

Speaking solely for myself, my intent with the "pre-license change"
fork of ion is to bring it up to par with the other fork just to clear
up the license issue, and then see where things go from there.
Hopefully it won't last long enough for real confusion to set in.

Good luck to all of us,
Kevin

>
>
> Arnout
>
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