[pacman-dev] License for new contributions?

[Dan McGee]

On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 3:44 AM, Allan McRae <allan at archlinux.org> wrote:
> On 28/02/11 17:52, edmeister46 at hushmail.com wrote:
>>
>> On Sat, 26 Feb 2011 13:55:27 -0400 Xavier Chantry
>> <chantry.xavier at gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sat, Feb 26, 2011 at 6:42 PM,<edmeister46 at hushmail.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> Hello pacman team!
>>>>
>>>> I've been following development for quite some time, and would
>>>
>>> like
>>>>
>>>> to submit my package signing patches for review.
>>>>
>>>
>>> Out of curiosity, what do these patches accomplish exactly ?
>>
>> Bindings for openssl implemented in the backend (alpm).
>
> For the base64 decoding?
>
>
>>>> However, since some of the files are entirely new, they would
>>>
>>> have
>>>>
>>>> a license header. I would like to know under what license should
>>>
>>> I
>>>>
>>>> release my work.
>>>>
>>>> I bring this up because during this time I overlooked the
>>>
>>> inclusion
>>>>
>>>> of the rankmirrors script, which I've now noticed to be GPL v3
>>>
>>> code.
>>>>
>>>> Should my files be GPL v2 or v3?
>>>>
>>>
>>> Why don't you use the same header that all C files in pacman have,
>>> which is "gpl v2 or later" ?
>>
>> You see, "or later" includes v3. And since I want to keep up to
>> date with RMS' licenses, I prefer v3. Because of this, I'd like to
>> know if v3 is acceptable before releasing my work. Some of v2 is
>> sadly susceptible to loopholes.
>
> I believe that Dan has not accepted a patch before when the license was
> changed to GPL3, even though the majority of the file was rewritten by the
> submitter.  I'm not sure what the policy on new files is, but I would not be
> too hopeful...

I am not a fan of fragmented licensing (nor RMS for that matter); thus
I would expect contributions to be under GPLv2 or later as the
existing code is. Like it or not, your contributions are not
standalone or worth much by themselves when not in the bigger context
of the project, and that is currently licensed as GPLv2, and I'd like
it to stay that way. I feel like GPLv3 offers us nothing we currently
need or want.

This will be my last email on this topic to prevent it from descending
into any sort of a license war/discussion/bikeshed.

-Dan