Hi, On Sun, May 9, 2010 at 10:37 PM, Lars Wirzenius <lars@catalyst.net.nz> wrote:
* It would further simplify things if there is an explicit policy that all code included in the project should be using the same license, or at least that all new code will use the same license. At the very least all licenses used by Koha should be compatible with each other.
Since Koha embeds the source for some third-party libraries, compatibility of the overall license chosen for Koha is the best that could be achieved for that kind of code.
* The copyright ownership of each file is a bit hidden. The copyright statements (years, owners) in each file do not seem to reflect actual status. This should be cleaned up at some point. Luckily, git has every change, correctly attributed, it seems, so it's just some hard work that needs to happen. This is somewhat unrelated to a license switch, but it's going to be important at some point, so it'd be good to keep it on the table.
As a related note, I'd like to gently remind contributors that if you are adding a new file, please don't blindly copy over the 'Copyright 2000-2002 Katipo Communications' statement unless your contribution is archeological in nature.
* GPL version 3 is the updated version of GPL version 2. The spirit is the same, most of the conditions are the same, but many of the details have changed. Where GPLv2 was written in an era of mailing data tapes around, GPLv3 is written in the modern world. In my opinion, the changes are for the better, but that is a personal opinion. I don't have a pointer to a summary of the changes; perhaps someone could dig one up?
A bit verbose, but: http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html
* GPLv3 and AGPLv3 allow mixing, we don't have to choose just one, but it'd be simpler to do so. However, it might be reasonable to have some of the backend code be GPLv3 to allow other projects to use it more easily. For example, the SIP2 implementation?
That points to a problem. Koha's SIP2 implementation is actually a fork of OpenNCIP [1], and I would like to merge in Koha's changes at some point and remove the fork. But even if the fork never gets resolved, there's a problem: OpenNCIP's license is GPL2, not GPL2+. As GPL2 and GPL3 are incompatible licenses, if we license Koha using the GPL3+, we couldn't use Koha's SIP2 support code until either OpenNCIP is relicensed to GPL2+ or we get specific permission from the original copyright holder (the Georgia Public Library Service). [1] http://sourceforge.net/projects/openncip/ Regards, Galen -- Galen Charlton gmcharlt@gmail.com