
JQuery dropping GPL from licence requires CLA , Big corporations hand? - mariuz
http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/jQuery-dropping-GPL-from-licence-1705461.html
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CGamesPlay
What a sensationalist title. They dropped GPL, leaving MIT. This is a big win.
MIT is significantly more free than GPL (it does not mandate that you make
things derived from it free, but the license itself does provide more
liberties than GPL).

They require CLA, so that they can put the code under MIT. It's legal
silliness, but how is it at all bad?

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jeltz
> They require CLA, so that they can put the code under MIT. It's legal
> silliness, but how is it at all bad?

Why would a CLA help with that? Since all existing code is already licensed
under MIT, and for future code they can just refuse to merge anything not
under MIT. The only use a CLA has is if anyone thought the MIT restrictions
were too harsh, but I cannot see when that would be the case. You can do
almost anything with MIT licensed code.

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novaleaf
it's because contributor work is under it's own copyright, per individual.
This is a huge legal (bureaucratic) issue and thus the CLA is meant to
normalize all contributions to fall under the MIT.

also I know this is getting into inflammable territory but the GPL (v3
especially) is a very big turn off to adoption for a lot of for-profit
companies due to worries that if they use the GPL code, their product and all
derivative works are "tainted" (need to provide 'free' source access)

Thus I can see the removal of GPL as being a clarifying factor, as lots of
companies dual license GPL and a proprietary license, which may lead to
misunderstanding in this case.

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jeltz
I have no problem at all with the dropping of GPL. Dropping GPL may stop any
worries that jQuery at some point in the future will drop MIT in favor of GPL
(though they still could do that since MIT is GPL compatible).

The license itself is what normalizes the copyrights, so a CLA is just
additional bureaucracy. The contributors to jQuery have already all agreed to
contribute their code under MIT, so why would they need to do it again?

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simias
I'm always a bit surprised that an open source project can change its
licensing terms so easily. Can't any contributor to the project with their
code upstream oppose this change? How does that work?

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pm215
If your project insists on copyright assignment (as the FSF does) then there's
a single copyright owner and the project can make any licensing change it
likes. Otherwise (assuming you don't manage to get explicit agreement from all
previous contributors for their past changes) the only licensing term changes
you can make are those which the previous license already permitted. For
instance, many projects use a "GPL v2 or any later option" wording, which
would allow them to later move to GPLv3 even though they had previously
accepted contributions made when v3 didn't even exist.

In this case it looks like jQuery was previously dual-license MIT-and-GPL, so
anybody who contributed to it was saying "you can use these changes under
either MIT or GPL". That means it's entirely OK for the project to switch to
"just MIT", because "MIT" was an option all those contributors were permitting
already.

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simias
Makes sense. Thanks.

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dmethvin
I hope the people upvoting this are doing it to encourage discussion, not to
agree with this totally inane post. There is no controversy.

Dual licensing confused people for no good reason. Some people thought that
including jQuery in their own projects would somehow apply the GPL on their
project, since that was one of the licenses. The idea of choosing one license
and not the other seemed odd, and most people are just users (not derivative
work creators) so it doesn't even affect them.

> Some users were surprised by the change

Nobody has expressed surprise anywhere but the few people who posted here
without reading the original post. The link to the bug tracker wasn't a user
_surprised_ by the change, it was someone simply reporting that we'd forgotten
to remove the GPL from one of about two dozen pages where we had it mentoned.
That's fixed now.

> A search of the site shows that details of the actual agreements are not
> currently available.

The only reason we didn't link the CLA or CAA is because it contains a form
that the contributor submits and we don't want a bunch of crap posted back to
us by people who aren't contributors. dave1010uk posted a link to the text
below, and I've added a todo to make that text available on another page.

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dave1010uk
Full text of the CLA: <http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZehcMYyX>

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novaleaf
a lot of people don't understand the reason for the CLA:

it's because contributor work is under it's own copyright, per individual.
This is a huge legal (bureaucratic) issue and thus the CLA is meant to
normalize all contributions to fall under the MIT

disclaimer: I'm not related with jQuery, this is based on my prior knowledge
of open source contribution legal issues.

~~~
jeltz
Do you have an example of where this has been a problem? Most open source
projects lack a CLA and do not have problems with bureaucracy. For example the
PostgreSQL and Linux projects lack any CLA and have never had any problems
with this as far as I know.

Lacking a CLA means one less hurdle for new developers. The advantage of a CLA
is that you can change license, but if you are MIT licensed you can already
change to almost any license without requiring any approval from the
community. CLA:s only make sense for very strict licenses.

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mseepgood
CLA... wow, this is bad and sad. :(

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batista
Actually it's very good news.

It means that no single zealot or bad apple can stop the code from being used
in ways the users want.

E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia,
killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the
code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for
free.

And you still get GPL with their MIT licence: "The Foundation confirms that
with the MIT licence, if someone desires GPL licensing, they are free to make
changes and re-license it under the GPL."

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tspiteri
I don't like how you brand Denis-Courmont a zealot or bad apple for not
letting others break the license terms of his code. He licensed his code under
the GPL for a reason, and if someone doesn't like his license, they shouldn't
expect him to waive his rights on his code. (I don't know about the case, I'm
basing this on your comment alone.)

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ejames
Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to
criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech,
but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating
on your spouse is not a crime, but doing so still makes you a worse person.
You have the right to keep all your money instead of giving a penny to
charity, but being charitable is better. "Legal" and "good" are not the same
thing.

Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can
very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every
person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their
code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a
particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people
obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.

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archangel_one
Calling him a zealot just for using the GPL seems a bit unnecessary to me, but
whatever. It does not matter what his reasons are for it, he is allowing
people to use the code he wrote under a certain set of conditions, which some
people have not been honouring. I don't believe there is anything wrong with
him calling them on that; why should he just sit there quietly while other
people violate his license and profit off his work?

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batista
> _why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license
> and profit off his work?_

Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of
iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't
care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available
and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge
conflict of interest?

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tspiteri
Maybe Apple and Microsoft should release all their software under a permissive
license for the good of hundreds of millions of users. Is that what you are
suggesting? I do not have any problem with people/corporations
releasing/selling their code as they see fit, but I do take issue at people
feeling entitled to set the terms for other people's code. If the other
contributors do not mind the violation, they are free to remove his code and
release their code as they see fit.

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andreasvc
They say they drop the GPL to avoid confusion ... i.e., they're caving in to
FUD about GPL.

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justincormack
It is very unclear with Javascript what a derived work is and what linking
means, unlike C. You could argue that your whole website would become GPL if
you linked with jquery under GPL terms, including the text, logos etc, even
though most people do not want to put documentation under GPL (because of the
attribution terms).

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Robby2012
wow, this are really good news :)

