Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
dolphin-emu.org
Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
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Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#2I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#3> In practice, GPLv3 only adds more restrictions to the license
Not at all. They say so themselves: GPLv3 adds compatibility with Apache v2, which GPLv2 lacks. This thus removes a restriction.
GPLv3 also clarifies some things from GPLv2, such as being explicit about being applicable not only to software, and giving a clearer meaning of what distributing software means. GPLv3 calls this "conveying".
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#4I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
Some people (Linus Torvalds is a notable example) think that GPLv3's provisions that forbid things like locked down hardware are too much. They would rather be "permissive" and allow hardware that restricts what the user can do with it.
What good is modifiable software if the hardware will refuse to run software if it's modified? Tell me, Mr Anderson, what good is a phone call when you are unable to speak?
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#5I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
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Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#6I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
Licensing GPLv2+ means you'll accept any future "GPLv4", "GPLv5" etc without having any idea what those licenses will look like. You might end up not liking having them apply to your code. What if control of FSF is taken over as if like a coup and a nasty "GPLv4" is released?
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#7I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
GPLv2+ means you are accepting the terms of GPLv5. What's in GPLv5? I have no idea. No one has any idea. It might never get written. As long as RMS is in charge, I'm not worried about the contents of the next GPL dramatically differing from the current spirit.
However, there is no guarantee that I will agree with future versions of the GPL. I'd like to judge them as they come. It's actually really strange to sign up for an open ended contract where a 3rd party is writing the revisions.
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#8I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
If you're talking about Dolphin, read the article again. Nobody refused, but a few people couldn't be contacted - unlike Linux, Dolphin has never required real names from contributors, so this mostly consisted of a few people who contributed under an alias a few years ago before utterly vanishing from the Internet.
EDIT: disregard; didn't see the graph, and wasn't previously aware of the one person who refused. See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9600204 for the correct answer.
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#9> In practice, GPLv3 only adds more restrictions to the license Not at all. They say so themselves: GPLv3 adds compatibility with Apache v2, which GPLv2 lacks. This thus removes a restriction. GPLv3 also clarifies some things from GPLv2, such as being explicit about being applicable not only to software, and giving a clearer meaning of what distributing software means. GPLv3 calls this "conveying".
That's not true at all. Read up on the different licenses. The reason v3 was created was to fight tivoization, where the code is realeased, but the hardware prevents loading updated copies. From the point of view of a company licensing their source, v3 is much more restrictive. It requires a lot more things than a more free license. Linux is famous for rejecting it because of that.
Yes, there's a benefit that you are compatible with other more strict licenses, but that's like saying moving from GPL to proprietary is less restrictive because then you are compatible with the rest of your proprietary code at your company. Being more compatible with less free licenses is not more free.
Re: Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+
#10I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2 and GPLv2+...
If you're talking about Dolphin, read the article again. Nobody refused, but a few people couldn't be contacted - unlike Linux, Dolphin has never required real names from contributors, so this mostly consisted of a few people who contributed under an alias a few years ago before utterly vanishing from the Internet. EDIT: disregard; didn't see the graph, and wasn't previously aware of the one person who refused. See h…
Looking at the graph mouseover, I think 10 contributors refused to relicense. Their contributions were removed from the codebase.