I am not a lawyer, but I am a little bit of a Free Software geek. Very
briefly, GPL 3 adds restrictions on using software patents and DRM with the
programs that use it. I'm not even entirely sure what these restrictions
are.
My very wild guess us that MediaWiki probably can go the GPL 3 way.
MediaWiki mostly runs on servers, so DRM is probably not an issue. Maybe it
could be an issue on iPhones, but our iPhone app is not GPL anyway, because
Apple really hates having GPL software in its AppStore.
About patents I know even less, and it is such a complicated legal subject
that only qualified people should discuss it.
So we probably won't lose much by going there.
What shall we gain? Reduction of the risk to contaminate software that is
supposed to power Free knowledge with DRM and patents. Both things are
obnoxious and can make knowledge less Free.
But again, that's the Free Software geek in me speaking. A real lawyer may
have a much better reply.
Also, though MediaWiki is GPL 2, some components that Wikimedia develops
ate licensed under MIT and Apache licenses, which are permissive and
noncopyleft, so maybe we don't care very much about strong GNU-style
software Freedom protection in the first place.
בתאריך 7 בפבר 2015 21:58, "Thomas Mulhall" <thomasmulhall410(a)yahoo.com>
כתב:
Hi should we upgrade GPL to version 3 since version 3
is more modern then
version 2. Should it be updated in extensions, skins and MediaWiki.
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-l mailing list
Wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l