Ulrich Mueller posted on Fri, 26 Jan 2018 10:36:49 +0100 as excerpted: > Apparently licensing of the Gentoo repository was changed from GPL-2+ > to GPL-2 (only) in 2002, see for example [1] and [2]. I cannot find any > announcement or discussion about this. > > Who was around in 2002 and still remembers what was the rationale? > > Ulrich > > [1] > https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo/historical.git/commit/skel.ebuild? id=e67af11c176e4dca33846e65c2649aa456de3099 > [2] > https://gitweb.gentoo.org/repo/gentoo/historical.git/commit/header.txt? id=dc4dfe8aa903fb467e648da80f8bc3178411a77a
I wasn't around in 2002, but I was researching it by late 2003 and began installing in early 2004, by which point Gentoo was suffering the aftermath of the bitter split with Zynot and DRobbins was pretty much out after having set up the Gentoo Foundation and (what became the) Council. The Zynot side was focused on embedding and trying to take things commercial, while accusing DRobbins of trying to do effectively the same thing but with a(n IIRC) gaming focus. That war has long since been fought and history has played out with Gentoo still around and Zynot... not, so I'll try to avoid inserting opinion /too/ much (tho I'm sure more recent events played out how they did in part due to that history, people around then simply weren't interested in what must have sounded rather similar), but... The switch to GPLv2-only would have been made in the fight for its life that was the Gentoo/Zynot fork, and almost certainly had to do with trying to ensure that the gentoo/x86 tree could not be taken private without community recourse, in an era before GPLv3 existed and there was some uncertainty about what its legal terms were going to be, while those of the GPLv2 were known, it had broad community support, and was at least /somewhat/ legally tested. Of course as we know it's possible for an entity owning copyright on a GPLed work to also sell the rights to use it commercially, with the GPL preventing others from doing the same, and that's what both sides were accusing the other of trying to do, but as we've seen play out in other contexts, the one thing the GPL /does/ do is provide a guarantee that the code as-is will remain free, and community improvements to it without a CLA letting the entity trying to take it proprietary are then disallowed from being used to further that entity's plots. With the uncertainty surrounding the still coming GPLv3 at that point, I believe the intent was to ensure that continued. OTOH, those on the Zynot side would surely argue that the intent was to ensure that Zynot couldn't take it private, while Gentoo/DRobbins could, especially since at the time copyright was assigned to Gentoo. Of course now we have the advantage of looking back it it in history and can see how things turned out, but back then, it was far less clear how things would turn out. -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
