[OPEN-ILS-DOCUMENTATION] GPL version for code in documentation (was: Please Vote on Evergreen Documentation Licensing)

[Dan Scott]

On Mon, 2009-12-21 at 11:06 -0500, Karen Collier wrote:
> As discussed at the Documentation Interest Group Meeting on December, 9, 2009, I am calling for a vote on Documentation Licensing.  Members of the Documentation Interest Group and interested members of the Evergreen Community, please vote yes or no on the following proposals by Monday, January 4, 2009 by replying to this email on the Evergreen Documentation mailing list (open-ils-documentation at list.georgialibraries.org).
> 
> 1 - Official Evergreen Documentation produced by the Documentation Interest Group should be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/).
> 
> 2 - Any code included in the official documentation produced by the Documentation Interest Group should also be made available under the GNU GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

I have to point out one small technicality; the version of the GNU GPL
that is linked to is the GPL v3.0, whereas the OpenSRF and Evergreen
code is GPL v2 or later (I _think_ we've applied the "or, at your
option, any later version" redistribution clause consistently, when we
have included the license header in source files).

Oddly enough, the GPL v2 and GPL v3.0 are incompatible according to the
creators of those licenses; to use code licensed under "GPL v2 or later"
with GPL v3.0 code, one must choose the "or later" option and relicense
the code under the GPL v3.0.

I'm not opposed to the GPL v3.0 - among its benefits, it adds explicit
patent grants where the GPL v2 only carries an implicit patent grant,
and is written to comply with copyright laws worldwide instead of only
American copyright law - but we might want to keep the same "GPL v2, or
at your option, any later version" redistribution clause for the code in
the documentation, simply to keep it in sync with the OpenSRF /
Evergreen code base. Then, if at some point the project opts to move to
the GPL v3, we can bring the documentation along too.

My apologies for not providing this clarification earlier. Can we
consider the following a friendly amendment to the proposals?

Change:

2 - Any code included in the official documentation produced by the
Documentation Interest Group should also be made available under the GNU
GPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html).

To:

2 - Any code included in the official documentation produced by the
Documentation Interest Group should also be made available under the GNU
GPL version 2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/gpl-2.0.html),
including the "or, at your option, any later version" redistribution
clause.