On 7/29/07, Pablo De Napoli <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> William (and others):
>
> There is a licence issue about Sage raised by GPL-v3, that may be you
> need to consider
> (I'm not a lawyer so that what I'm saying could be wrong).
This comes up in sage-devel about once every other month.
Thanks for revisiting the question.
> Currently according to the COPYING file, Sage is released under GPL version 2.
>
This is correct. It is currently forced on SAGE because I think
at least one of the libraries SAGE depends upon, e.g., PARI, is
GPL V2 only.
> The problem is that some packages included in Sage will be soon relicence
> under
> GPL-version 3, for example GNU GSL version 1.10 will certainly released under
> GPL-version 3 (and so will be most FSF stuff).
You're right, SAGE won't include any GPL V3 only packages until SAGE itself
is relicensed GPL V3. That won't happen until every component
of SAGE is relicensed under a GPL V3 compatible license.
> If I understand things well, you cannot link such a library to a
> GPL-v2 project, without
> releasing the whole project under GPL-v3, am I right?
> If this is true, then it might be necesary to consider relicensing
> Sage under GPL-v3.
> But this would mean to get explicit permision from all Sage contributors
> (Since Sage is not released "under GPL-v2 and any later version..."
> but explicitey under "GPL-v2")
Yes, I cannot release SAGE under GPL V3 until:
1. Every single component of SAGE, including PARI,
is licensed under a GPL V3 compatible license, and
2. I get permission from all copyright holders of new code included
in the SAGE library itself (probably >= 50 people) to switch from
GPL V2 to "GPL V2 or later".
I could start with 2. without having to wait for 1. The problem is
that it's a lot of busywork that I have no desire whatever to deal
with, since I much prefer doing mathematics and coding.
My current plan is to stop including new
versions of any packages that switch to GPL V3 only licenses,
wait to see what happens with all the packages that SAGE depends
on that are currently not GPL V3 compatible, then revisit this
questions later. We should also watch to see how the Debian
project deals with GPLv3 problems. It will be interesting
to see how the Linux kernel deals with this issue, since they
also have copyright spread over hundreds of people and I
think they are currently GPL V2 only.
Does that sound reasonable to sage-devel?
William
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