[IAEP] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+

[Bernie Innocenti]

The oversight board is considering a motion to upgrade the license of
Sugar from "GPLv2 or later" to "GPLv3 or later". Before proceeding to a
vote, we'd like to request feedback from the community. In particular,
we'd like to know how this change might affect you as a Sugar end-user,
distributor, contributor or maintainer.

Free Software licensing is a complex topic. To keep the level of the
discussion high, please contribute to this thread only after making a
small effort to inform yourself.


== Questions & Answers ==

Q: what's the benefit of upgrading to the GPLv3? 
A: The full rationale for the GPLv3 is provided here:
   http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.html

Q: Do we need to ask the permission of all copyright holders?
A: No, we'll take advantage of the "or any later version" clause in the
current license. We're not retroactively re-licensing existing code.

Q: How is the actual license change done?
A: We need to replace the COPYING file in the source code and update the
headers of all source files. This operation can easily be automated.

Q: What if the maintainer of a module wants to keep the GPLv2 or later?
A: This is is perfectly acceptable, but the combined work comprising
GPLv2 and GPLv3 modules would fall under the GPLv3.

Q: Are there license compatibility problems with GNOME, Python or other
libraries we depend on?
A: To the best of our knowledge, all Sugar dependencies are compatible
with the GPLv3.

Q: When will the change happen?
A: We're looking at the 0.94 release cycle. Maintainers of individual
activities and non-core projects can update their license at any time,
or not at all.

Q: What about sugar-toolkit, which is LGPLv2+?
A: Following the path of least resistance, every LGPLv2+ module will be
upgraded to the LGPLv3+.

Q: How will the GPLv3+ affect anti-theft systems?
A: As long as end-users can request and receive developer keys, the
Bitfrost anti-theft system is compatible with the anti-tivoization
clause of the GPLv3.

Q: How will the GPLv3+ affect OLPC deployments?
A: Sugar will simply add a few more GPLv3 packages to the ones already
present in Fedora, so there is no real difference here -- The
deployments are *already* using GPLv3 software today.

-- 
Bernie Innocenti
Sugar Labs Infrastructure Team
http://wiki.sugarlabs.org/go/Infrastructure_Team