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

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

On Fri, Sep 03, 2010 at 05:02:30PM -0500, kevin granade wrote:
> Personally I don't want to contribute to anything non-free, even if it is 
> dual-licensed with a free license.

Of course, the ION license is not *that* non-free - it might actually even be 
DFSG-free, for example. All the nasty stuff only applies when you distribute 
the softare under the name 'Ion'. But let's not get into the 'my license is 
free-er than yours' discussion too much ;).

> There is a stakeholder you are skipping: 

Obviously - I was just talking about 'stakeholders' that might have a *legal* 
objection to what we're doing

> 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.

Though that's a valid concern, on the other hand there's plenty of proprietary
software pretty conveniently available for most distro's, and we can probably 
do even better.

> > 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.

This is a good idea. My fear is/was that it will not materialize. There's a 
lot of talk (and yes, I'm partly guilty of that too :) ), but only a few people
have actually moved the project forward since it was abandoned in september 
2009. 

Forking the latest version (and taking the weird license for granted) will 
provide an upgrade path for existing ion3 users that is as painless as 
possible, with the least amount of effort required - and even this is taking
longer than I had hoped.

> Hopefully it won't last long enough for real confusion to set in.
> Good luck to all of us,

Indeed :)


Arnout