[Its.an.education.project] Manifest

[Bernie Innocenti]

Edward Cherlin wrote:

> "We acknowledge that some of our users require the use of works that
> do not conform to the Debian Free Software Guidelines. We have created
> "contrib" and "non-free" areas in our archive for these works. The
> packages in these areas are not part of the Debian system, although
> they have been configured for use with Debian."
> 
> Are we going to clone the Debian archive structure? Wil we accept
> non-free software into Sugar?

I think everybody would agree that we won't actively _prevent_ non-free
software from running on Sugar.  And we certainly also won't _write_
non-free software ourselves.

So what about _distributing_ non-free software?  At this time it
seems better to sidestep the question: as long as the scope of the
project remains limited to maintaining a multi-platform Sugar desktop
environment that vendors will distribute as part of their OSes.
It's their problem, not ours.


> Also, do we consider the BSD license to be sufficiently free? I don't.
> I agree with the OLPC insistence on GPL. But I'm willing to listen to
> reasons supporting a contrary opinion.

While I'm not going to condemn or exclude BSD software, I'd also insist
on using GPL for anything we produce.  Either GPLv2+ or GPLv3+.  Insofar,
this would not change anything with respect to previous practice at OLPC.

Personally, I would recommend moving to GPLv3 to help ensuring that
nobody could use our software on a locked-down machine that would prevent
its users from upgrading it.  This is no longer an hypothetical scenario.

But note well: right now I'd prefer not to spend too much time on
advocating the GPLv3 or any other license: we inherited a large GPLv2+
code base, and it could remain so for a few more months while we sort out
urgent organizational issues and get things rolling.  Of course, any
license change would require a certain amount of consensus among the Sugar
developers.

Does it make sense?

-- 
   \___/
  _| o |  Bernie Innocenti - http://www.codewiz.org/
  \|_X_|  "It's an education project, not a laptop project!"