On Mon, Dec 13, 2010 at 9:35 PM, Wikus van de Merwe <dupakrop...@googlemail.com> wrote: > So as you see, the GPL alone as well as the special case of licensing of > web2py and application written for it is quite complex. I believe we all > would benefit from having all this explained in a separate section of the > website, to avoid confusion.
Massimo is not available atm for health reasons, but he has already considered doing this, and I'm sure he will make it very clear that web2py is, indeed, dual-licensed. >> 1) all web2py/*.py and web2py/gluon/*py files are LPGL > "The goal of the GPL is to grant everyone the freedom to copy, redistribute, > understand, and modify a program. If you could incorporate GPL-covered > software into a non-free system, it would have the effect of making the > GPL-covered software non-free too." [10] > > And I believe this is a major point in the discussion. Special privileges > for distribution of the application code is one thing, and allowing > proprietary derivative works of the framework itself is another. To be > honest I don't see any benefits of such a licence change. Thank you for summing that up. :) I also believe people are missing the main point here, and that is Massimo is fully commited to the points above. That is the first reason why he chose GPL as the license in the first place. To go against the authors' wishes just to change the license to the one someone feels more comfortable with is unfair to say the least. As Massimo said once, web2py is not about creating a mass-consumption framework. There are plenty of those to go around. His wish is to create a good framework that does its job well, and I think GPL license can only help that. > This is what we currently have, with except to LGPL for files in contrib, so > I guess there is not much to discuss here. As long as contrib files are > optional and their licence is GPL compatible, everything is fine here. > Binaries under the GPL exception are effectively freeware. And the template > app will work best as public domain as the licensing issues won't get in the > way. It might be good though to explicitly state the permissions (e.g. as in > CC0 [11])as in some countries such as France, work can't be put into the > public domain voluntarily. Again, even the welcome app can be GPL as long as there is an exception clause similar to the one used for web2py apps. For instance, if you consider welcome app as part of web2py (because it uses it to scaffold new applications via the wizard, for instance), all development on the welcome app should contribute back to upstream, and GPL ensures this. However, the actual use of the welcome app for scaffolding your apps can be liberated from the terms of GPL. It all depends on whether you consider it worthwhile to do that. -- Branko Vukelić bg.bra...@gmail.com stu...@brankovukelic.com Check out my blog: http://www.brankovukelic.com/ Check out my portfolio: http://www.flickr.com/photos/foxbunny/ Registered Linux user #438078 (http://counter.li.org/) I hang out on identi.ca: http://identi.ca/foxbunny Gimp Brushmakers Guild http://bit.ly/gbg-group
