

Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+ - mparlane
https://dolphin-emu.org/blog/2015/05/25/relicensing-dolphin/

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Ruud-v-A
I think it is a mistake to license anything under a “or later version”
license. If you do that, you licence your code under a license that you have
never read, so how can you know that it serves your intentions? You are
blindly licensing code under a licence that has yet to be written!

In the GPL case, the Free Software Foundation states that “The Free Software
Foundation may publish revised and/or new versions of the GNU General Public
License from time to time. Such new versions will be similar in spirit to the
present version, but may differ in detail to address new problems or
concerns.” (Section 14 of the GPLv3.) Now of course I don’t expect the FSF to
publish something radically different, but they _could_ do so. Even if you
trust the FSF now, are you sure you trust the FSF twenty years from now?

~~~
carussell
Even in the worst case scenario, it remains available under the original
license, and that's not going to change.

What is the worst case scenario, by the way? You could say it depends on who
you are. One such scenario would be for developers who agree with the FSF's
strong copyleft philosophy who are betrayed by a future hypothetical revision
that removes all copyleft provisions to make it no stronger than, e.g., BSD.
This affects only a subset of those choosing a license for their project.
(I.e., if you don't care about copyleft, this purportedly horrific thing
doesn't even affect you.) Funnily enough, the subset of those who would be
affected are hardly ever the ones I see making the argument you are.

So what terrible things do you imagine the worst case scenario involving?

~~~
belorn
I would like to know that too, since all the worst case scenario I can think
of is also defining aspects of permissive licensed projects.

For example, a community could fork a project and license it under a new'er
version, and then the original founder could suddenly want to incorporate the
new changes but at the same time not want to use the new license, and the new
community refuses request for a license to the old version. I don't think it
ever has happen with a gplv2+ project, and it require a quite hostile
community to begin with, but as a worst case scenario that would likely be it.

------
jordigh
> In practice, GPLv3 only adds more restrictions to the license

Not at all. They say so themselves: GPLv3 adds compatibility with Apache v2,
which GPLv2 lacks. This thus removes a restriction.

GPLv3 also clarifies some things from GPLv2, such as being explicit about
being applicable not only to software, and giving a clearer meaning of what
distributing software means. GPLv3 calls this "conveying".

~~~
lnanek2
That's not true at all. Read up on the different licenses. The reason v3 was
created was to fight tivoization, where the code is realeased, but the
hardware prevents loading updated copies. From the point of view of a company
licensing their source, v3 is much more restrictive. It requires a lot more
things than a more free license. Linux is famous for rejecting it because of
that.

Yes, there's a benefit that you are compatible with other more strict
licenses, but that's like saying moving from GPL to proprietary is less
restrictive because then you are compatible with the rest of your proprietary
code at your company. Being more compatible with less free licenses is not
more free.

~~~
silon5
IMO, GPL2 has all the stuff against tivoization already there (preferred form
for modification -- if I can't modify it for actual hardware, it's not
enough).

~~~
chii
then why can you not modify your tivo?

GPL2 hasn't had that problem present when it was written, and so tivo found a
way to prevent practical modification, even tho they followed the letter of
the license.

In my eyes, most, if not all open source software should use AGPL, and dual
license a commercial license offer for those people who want to buy it for
modification. You should contribute, or pay up, else the tragedy of the
commons will occur.

~~~
sokoloff
AGPL is a market failure as I see it. I understand and sympathize with what
that license is trying to do, but in practice, it just means that many
companies won't touch that software (or will only touch it in a fashion where
they don't modify that part of the system), meaning that there are far fewer
adopters at all, and of those that adopt, fewer modify the software, meaning
that it evolves more slowly than products with more used licenses.

~~~
detaro
Biggest problem seems to be kind-of unclear rules where it stops, especially
when it comes to web applications (templates, linked assets, ...).

There are surprisingly few "trustworthy" comments on that out there, most
stuff you find is a bunch of people going "I think XXX, but IANAL" on stack
overflow.

------
song
I'm wondering about those 0.5% who refused to relicense. What would be the
rational behind refusing such a change. I can understand refusing for a
project to be relicensed under a very different license but not between GPLv2
and GPLv2+...

~~~
comex
If you're talking about Dolphin, read the article again. Nobody refused, but a
few people couldn't be contacted - unlike Linux, Dolphin has never required
real names from contributors, so this mostly consisted of a few people who
contributed under an alias a few years ago before utterly vanishing from the
Internet.

EDIT: disregard; didn't see the graph, and wasn't previously aware of the one
person who refused. See
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9600204](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9600204)
for the correct answer.

~~~
xahrepap
I read it. And it's still confusing because of this graph (from the article):

[https://dolphin-
emu.org/m/user/blog/relicensing/relicensepie...](https://dolphin-
emu.org/m/user/blog/relicensing/relicensepie.svg)

Note: "0.5% Refused. Code Rewritten"

If you mouse over that graphic in the article it says 1 person refused.
However, the article otherwise completely ignores that 1 person... (unless I
missed it, both times ;) )

~~~
malka
they Probably do not want to générale (further ?) Drama by publicly pointing
fingers.

------
foldor
How come there was no mention of the upcoming OSVR partnership as one of the
final straws to push forward with this change?

