[Sugar-devel] ANNOUNCE: Moving Sugar to GPLv3+

[Sebastian Silva]

Even though I haven't spoken with Bernie about his rationale for 
proposing the upgrade of the license I would like to explain why I 
strongly feel that as a member of the SLOBs board and as a 
representative of the community I have the duty to back the proposal. 
You see GPL is not only a legality. As Bernie pointed out in a previous 
email, the GPL is designed to protect user's four freedoms. GPLv3 is 
only an update to protect users from new forms of abuse (like 
tivoization). I would really detest to see publishers exploit GPLv2 to 
provide children with DRM'd books or hardware distributors providing 
hardware that is unupgradable by the user.

In my platform for the board I very clearly stated as my  °1 core value 
that "Sugar is Free software because ... it makes explicit the freedom 
to learn to learn". So I consider it a core part of sugar's mission to 
defend user's rights to learn to learn and interpret the community's 
vote as seconding this.

Sebastian

El 21/04/11 17:18, Bernie Innocenti escribió:
> 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.
>