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

K.G.Schneider kgs at freerangelibrarian.com
Tue Dec 22 08:42:38 EST 2009


Dan, are you asking for a re-vote? If so, I suggest continuing with  
the vote and letting the balloting language stand as-is; it is clear,  
and allows some procedural latitude.

Karen G. Schneider

Sent from my iPhone

On Dec 22, 2009, at 4:39 AM, Dan Scott <dan at coffeecode.net> wrote:

> 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.
>
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