On Wed, Jan 08, 2020 at 08:53:57AM -0600, Karl O. Pinc wrote: > > Summary: The pmacct project is looking to relicense its code from the > > current GPL license to a more liberal BSD-style license. > > > > 1) Faced with our own mortality, it became clear that succession > > planning is of paramount importance for this project's continued > > success. We contemplated what happens in context of intellectual > > property rights should one of pmacct's contributors pass away, and > > realized potential heirs won't necessarily desire involvement in this > > open source project, potentially hampering changes to intellectual > > property policies in the project's future. > > > > 2) We suspect there are entities who violate the terms of pmacct's > > current GPL license, but at the same time we don't wish to litigate. > > Instead of getting infringers to change their behavior, relicensing > > the project could be another way to resolve the potential for > > conflict: we see benefits to removing rules we don't plan on > > enforcing anyway. > > On Wed, 8 Jan 2020 16:02:35 +0200 > Lennert Buytenhek <buyt...@wantstofly.org> wrote: > > > Although the stated reasoning > > for the relicensing effort feels somewhat specious to me, > > I agree. (Disclaimer: I'm not a contributor.) > > 1) If we wanted to change the licensing, we couldn't, after we're > dead. > > 2) People are violating our rights and we don't want to do > anything about it. > > I don't want to argue one way or another but it would be nice > to have a real reason. There are good reasons available, > all the way down to "I wrote most of it and I changed my mind." > > Even if there's some commercial entity that wants to sell > pmacct in their product and won't because of the licensing, > it would be nice to know this. Especially knowing who. > (E.g. We know that Amazon uses PostgreSQL as the basis > of their RDS database product, and does not contribute > back as far as I can tell.) It'd be nice to know who > the contributors are helping.
FWIW, I fully agree with this analysis. I chose to agree with the relicensing anyway as I don't think this is an important enough battle to fight. (If someone were to ask me to relicense my Linux kernel contributions under a closed-source-able license, I would be a lot more upset.) _______________________________________________ pmacct-discussion mailing list http://www.pmacct.net/#mailinglists
