On Tue, Mar 11, 2008 at 11:50 PM, Stefan Küng <tortoisesvn_at_gmail.com> wrote:
> > Stop contributing -- yes, since the overall license will be unclear.
> > (surely it could not be GPL without the source for the additional toolbar).
> > But it can be fixed easily by re-licensing to LGPL.
>
> What has the license of our sourcecode to do with this? TSVN is
> independent, has its own license. We can bundle commercial parts if we
> like - the other way around would be a problem though, but not this.
Well, you (or more generally the "TortoiseSVN Project")
will be distributing some product (TSVN+toolbar) in the binary form.
This product will be, obviously, derived from GPL software (TSVN)
which, according to GPL, requires the correspoinding source to
be supplied. You can not supply the toolbar source, so the license must change.
There are basically two options:
1) Dual-license TSVN into 'GPL+commercial' a-la MySQL.
This can be done since you are still listed as copyright holder
in most source files. It is ok and within your rights.
However, dual-licensing should be made explicit.
And some developers might have reservations against
contributing to such project.
2) Re-license TSVN into LGPL, which is designed explicitly
for this purpose. I, personally, would prefer this to option 1.
BTW, I think recent changes of copyright from "Stefan Kung"
to "TortoiseSVN" were unwise, since the latter is non-existant entity.
Those will greatly complicate any re-licensing or dual-licensing.
I think it should be changed back.
I hereby agree to assign copyright for all my source code contributions
to this date to Stefan Kung.
--
Alexander S. Klenin
Insight Experts Ltd.
Received on 2008-03-11 15:19:39 CET