[Sugar-devel] Licensing of the javascript libraries

[Daniel Narvaez]

Hello,

we need to decide how to license the new javascript libraries. I am mostly
clueless about the topic and I'm honestly scared to start this thread,
please be gentle :)

Following is the rationale I came up with for Agora. I think it probably
applies to the sugar-html libraries too. Feedback would be very welcome as
we are no expert.

---

I spent some time trying to decide which license is better for the various
part of Agora. It's an hard and important decision, I'm not a lawyer and
not even an expert but we need to make a call. My understanding is that a
license is better than nothing.

(L)GPLv2

* Copyleft. Requires all the modifications to be made freely available.
* Incompatible with Apache. Pretty bad, a lot of code already licensed that
way and growing fast (especially in the javascript world).

(L)GPLv3

* Copyleft
* Compatiible with Apache.
* Anti-tivoization clause. Mixed bag, would it prevent us to run on
hardware we are interested in? One problematic case I can think of is
distributing an activity through the Apple store. We wouldn't be able to do
that. Though people could still install the activity as a web app, from the
browser. Maybe that's good enough?
* Latest version. Better wording etc. Patents protection.
* We can distribute the sugar icons under LGPLv3, without requiring any
relicensing, because of the "or later" clause.
* My understanding is that if xi-* is LGPL, proprietary applications could
still use it without making modifications. The situation is not as clear as
for the traditional linked libraries case but from
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl-java.html I'd think we are fine.

Apache

* Non copyleft. It would be more friendly to companies that might want to
reuse code in their products. But is that likely to happen? Both xi and
omega are pretty agora specific. Still I think it's a good license to use
for more generic bits that we might develop (I used it for some python
helpers I'm using in eta for example).
* It seems to be the best permissive license because of the patents
protection. It's the most popular at least.

So I think there two choices basically:

1 Copyleft VS non copyleft. I think copyleft has advantages and practically
no real disadvantages for eta, xi and omega.

2 GPLv2 VS GPLv3. Compatibility with Apache would be good (maybe not
essential though? We could still use apache libraries I would think, just
not freely cut/paste code). Anti-tivoization is tricky, I honestly can't
make strong points one way or another. While I was initially sympathetic
with the claims that v3 is political I think
http://tieguy.org/blog/2007/06/28/gpl-v3-the-qa-part-4-odds-and-ends/ is a
good rebuttal of that argument. I'm somewhat worried about not being able
to distribute on some devices but, especially since we can always run
remotely, I'm not convinced we should opt out of v3 because of that.,

-- 
Daniel Narvaez
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