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

[Jonas Smedegaard]

On 11-04-25 at 02:14pm, Christoph Derndorfer wrote:
> Secondly you wrote "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." It can be argued that contributors and maintainers 
> have so far spoken up in this thread but users and distributors 
> haven't. I'm not quite sure why this is the case but it's probably 
> safe to assume that David has somewhat of a point when he says that 
> licensing isn't necessarily on the critical path of tasks for users 
> and deployments (which says nothing about whether licensing should or 
> shouldn't be a critical task for Sugar Labs itself IMHO). Additionally 
> I would suggest that reaching out to the relevant people and 
> organisations privately, pointing them to this thread, and encouraging 
> them to post their opinion might get some replies as not everybody 
> follows sugar-devel and IAEP religiously.

Well, let me then speak up as package maintainer for Debian:

I wholeheartedly agree with Martin here.  GPL-2+ signals a different 
political message than GPL-3+.  I am quite interested myself in the more 
aggressive GPL-3, but find it problematic FSF decided to label GPL-3 as 
a successor of GPL-2 instead of renaming the stem.  The reason is that 
in my opinion GPL-3 - as Aferro-GPL - is not improved wording of same 
intended license, but changes the game.

I therefore find it rude of projects to abuse the "flaw" in FSF license 
naming by "bumping" from GPL2 to GPL3.  It is cheating the authors.

I lack some responses in this thread from authors with the viewpoint of 
"oh thank you for taking care of my interests and refining my original 
intend by bumping to that new version of the GPL which more clearly 
states the same thing as I wanted back when I released my code to you."


That was representing myself only.  Debian officially is not pushing 
towards GPLv3 but accepts anything that fits the Debian Free Software 
Guidelines - which includes both "agressive" licenses like GPLv2 and 
GPLv3, and "passive" ones like BSD-3-clause and Expat (a.k.a. MIT).

I have very much enjoyed following this discussion.  Thanks for the well 
reflected arguments on both sides!


Regards, and good luck with this process,

 - Jonas

-- 
 * Jonas Smedegaard - idealist & Internet-arkitekt
 * Tlf.: +45 40843136  Website: http://dr.jones.dk/

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