[Freeipa-devel] Re: [Freeipa-users] IPA license

[Jason Gerard DeRose]

On Tue, 2009-09-15 at 18:09 -0400, Dmitri Pal wrote:
> Andrea Modesto Rossi wrote:
> > On Mar, 15 Settembre 2009 9:55 pm, Dmitri Pal wrote:
> >   
> >> We are considering to release freeIPA v2 under a less restrictive
> >> license than we used in IPA v1.
> >> It was "GPLv2 only" in v1.x and we think about "GPLv2 and later" or
> >> "GPLv3 and later".
> >> Please respond to this mail if there are any suggestions, comments or
> >> concerns.
> >>     
> >
> >
> > Well, GPL3 is a good idea but ts there a particular reason to change
> > license policy?
> >
> >
> >   
> It is just the fact that we came up with other components that we want
> to treat
> independently. It makes sense to license them with more flexible license
> for better adoption but exiting freeIPA license would create obstacles
> for it.

Andrea,

To elaborate on what Dmitri said, I would like to license the widget
library used for the IPAv2 WebUI under GPLv3+ or LGPLv3+, but
unfortunately there's a weird gotcha that prevents IPA under "GPLv2
only" from using any (L)GPLv3 libraries.

This wouldn't be a problem if IPA was "GPLv2 or later" instead of "GPLv2
only", but I think the consensus is that as long as we make any change
to the IPA license, we might as well migrate to "GPLv3 or later" (or at
least that's my opinion).

Although the widget library is the first place we encountered this
gotcha with "GPLv2 only", I'm sure it will come up again in the near
future, especially as IPA has such a plugin-focused architecture.  If I
understand the situation correctly, as it stands now you can't write an
IPA plugin that links to (um, imports) any (L)GPLv3 libraries/modules,
which is obviously far too restrictive and really limits what the
community can do with the code.  So sooner or later we're going to have
to make this change.

In an internal email conversation, Simo pointed me to this helpful
chart:

http://www.fsf.org/licensing/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility

Thoughts?


Cheers,
Jason