[IAEP] 3 questions about Sugar Desktop Copyleft

[Chris Leonard]

On Wed, Apr 20, 2016 at 12:06 PM, Dave Crossland <dave at lab6.com> wrote:
>
> On 20 April 2016 at 10:15, Chris Leonard <cjlhomeaddress at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>> We strongly encourage suitable licensing and attempt to use what leverage
>> we have (e.g. to host on ASLO or not) to nudge people in the path of
>> righteousness.
>
>
> Why not just have Sugar under GPL, then?
>

Sorry, forgot to include the obligatory IANAL in my reply.

I can't personally address your specific questions, IANAL, my attempt
at communicating some previous  history was not intended to convey the
official opinion of Sugar Labs or it's fiscal sponsor, the Conservancy
(SFC).  I only meant to say that when issues arise we try to deal with
them responsibly as a community dedicated to our stated principles.
We are very fortunate (through our fiscal sponsor) to have access to
some people who not only think very deep thoughts about open source
software licensing, but actually go out and fight the good fight to
defend those rights.

The Conservancy has often stated that compliance (not conflict) is
their goal (paraphrasing there) and has done excellent work by using
"soft power" and persuasion to achieve ends far more valuable than a
court order.   Sugar Labs has generally followed a similar strategy
and I hope will continue to do so.

To turn this discussion from theory to the practical, I am developing
a spreadsheet fo all activities hosted on ASLO.  My purpose is
initially related to i18n/L10n matters, so I am working on columns
defining the canonical repo, whether or not it has i18n, whether or
not it is currently hosted on Pootle, etc.

Let's pick an agreed upon format 9wiki, Google spreadsheet, whatever
as long as it supports table format and ideally sorting ,and I'll drop
my information there.  We'll make stone soup or whatever your cultural
variant of that is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_Soup

If someone would go through and add a column for license information
and someone else would go through and add a column for GTK3 porting
we'd have a useful resource that is more accessible for such global
questions that the current one-by-one review of activities in ASLO.
Sadly, it will quickly fall out of concurrency and need to be done all
over again unless we develop some self-reporting tricks like the
proposals to include such information in activity.info files and build
a parsing-reporting tool, but in the meantime there will have been a
top-to-bottom sweep that might catch things of interest that can be
resolved.

What format do people favor for something with a few hundreds rows and
a dozen or so columns?

cjl