[IAEP] Next slobs meeting?

[Christoph Derndorfer]

Am 05.06.2011 06:33, schrieb Bernie Innocenti:
> On Sun, 2011-06-05 at 04:03 +0200, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
>> Am 05.06.2011 02:57, schrieb Bernie Innocenti:
>>> I'd like to propose the following agenda topics:
>>>
>>>  * Membership fees
>>
>> Could you elaborate what you have in mind here? :-)
> 
> It's a prototype idea, not yet discussed anywhere yet. I'd like to know
> what the board members would think about asking a yearly fee from
> members and, in case there's interest, how it could be implemented.
> 
> I've done some research on how other foundations and free software
> projects like us handle memberships, but I've not yet made my mind on
> what works best.

Interesting stuff! Looking forward to reading the SLOBs meeting log to
see what everyone else thinks about this idea:-)

>> Oh, and what about the licensing issue, has that topic been settled or
>> will it require further discussion among the SLOBs and/or the larger
>> community?
> 
> We've discussed Scratch's licensing issues last week on #sugar and then
> on #acetarium (a social channel in which some Media Lab folks hang out).
> 
> The very short summary is that there are two different licenses for
> Scratch: one for the source code, which prohibits calling the resulting
> binary Scratch and uploading projects to the website, and one for
> binaries, which doesn't allow modification. It's hard to notice the
> problem, because they don't mention it even in the license FAQ.
> 
> I'm not in direct contact with whoever came up with these licensing
> terms, I've just been told that someone at the Media Lab was afraid
> that, if Scratch were distributed as free software, people would create
> incompatible forks of the language. Then one would wonder why popular
> free software languages such as Python, PHP, Perl and Ruby haven't ever
> been forked. There are better ways than a non-free license to prevent
> fragmentation.
> 
> As things stand, Scratch is in violation of our licensing policy (which
> coincides with the licensing policy of Fedora and most distributions).
> We could make an exception just for Scratch because it's so popular, but
> now there are additional complications. TOAST, which adheres to
> Trisquel's free software rules, can't even distribute the Sugar with the
> activity updater pointing at ASLO until we remove Scratch.
> 
> I'd like to discuss our options during the next board meeting. (until
> then, let's try to avoid having another licensing flame on iaep)

Okay, that sounds like a tough nut to crack.

However the licensing issue I had meant to inquire about (though I did
not at all make that clear in my previous message, mea culpa) is the one
about GPL v2 vs. v3.

In the May 13 Sugar-Digest Walter wrote "At the most recent Sugar
oversight-board meeting, we agreed to use a
referendum to take the pulse of the community (See
http://meeting.sugarlabs.org/sugar-meeting/meetings/2011-05-08).
Details to follow." so I had assumed that this topic would continue to
be discussed by the SLOBs.

Cheers,
Christoph

-- 
Christoph Derndorfer
co-editor, www.olpcnews.com
e-mail: christoph at olpcnews.com