Re: [Rosegarden-devel] Re rosegarden's license.

[Dave P. <dp...@we...>]

On 02/26/2012 03:10 PM, D. Michael McIntyre wrote:
> On Sunday, February 26, 2012, Dave Plater wrote:
>
>> ...Rosegarden has been marked GPLv2 or later for as long as I've been
>> maintaining it for openSUSE but when I submitted 11.11.42 to factory the
>> legal department license check said it was plain GPLv2. I must point out
>> that GPLv2 only can open a whole can of worms because it isn't compatible
>> with GPLv3 and a few other open source licenses, a lot of packages are
>> upgrading to GPLv3 so you could suddenly find problems with packages such
>> as jack, lilypond is now GPLv3 but fortunately rosegarden doesn't build
>> against it.
> I hate licenses with a passion, because no matter what you try to use them to
> accomplish, they always seem to fail in subtle ways while also burdening you
> with unexpected complications.  This situation is a perfect example.
>
> There was a time when I cared a great deal, and felt really strongly that
> Rosegarden should stay with GPLv2.  Now, I really don't care so much anymore,
> or even remember what the fuss was all about.
>
> I guess this really is something we should put to the developer community, so
> that anybody who has work involved in this gets a chance to voice any opinion
> they might have on the issue.
>
> Folks?  Opinions?
All you have to do is state in your README that rosegarden is GPLv2 or later and add or later to all your file headers. If you're happy 
with GPLv2 or later, I'm happy to update your svn and on the strength of your reply I can change release 11.11.42's tarball and satisfy our 
legal eagles. IMHO v2 or later is the easiest although not the most protective. In fact the easiest license of all that is compatible with 
almost any opensource license is "MIT" . If you have the time see :
http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Licensing:Main
Of course if you're really pissed off about licensing there's the :
http://sam.zoy.org/wtfpl/
Somebody from IBM complained about the abundance of profanities in the sources and when I went to update the package there was a huge patch 
which I refused to rewrite, there's nothing that a user sees that might offend the prudish, libcaca is a library that enables bored 
sysadmins to watch videos on a console. Xine-caca works quite well. The WTFPL is a valid open source license.

You give permission and I'll update your sources.

Regards
Dave