Hi everyone,
There's a ton of issues conflated in the SVN Extension access thread. I'm sure there are things we can improve about that process, and I'll talk to the people involved next week about it. I've asked Sumana not to rush out a response on this thread today, and I ask that we table non-license related issues until after Monday.
Now, on to the license issues:
On Fri, Nov 4, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Olivier Beaton olivier.beaton@gmail.com wrote:
There seems to have been concern with my original license, a BSD-2-Clause with copyright assignment so I don't lose the ability to distribute my code, this isn't the GPL, you need a contributor agreement with BSD (as I understand it).
Olivier, I'm sorry your access request didn't go the way you hoped, but this issue alone is enough to torpedo your access request. I'm generally sympathetic to the desire of commercial entities to have a copyright assignment clause (as I've written about before[1]). However, to the best of my knowledge, Wikimedia Foundation is not about to dive into that thicket, and I'd personally be vehemently opposed to us doing so.
As best I know, we don't have a stated policy for the license conditions for code that is contributed to our source repository, but we probably should. I'll take a stab at the previously unstated policy now: 1. We have a strong preference for "GPL version 2 or later" (more on this in a bit). 2. We generally accept licenses that are compatible with "GPL v2 or greater". BSD 2 and 3 clause, MIT, LGPL, and many other licenses fall into this category. 3. Don't mess with the license headers of code other people wrote without their consent, because: a) even in cases where it's legal (e.g. while it's perfectly legal to slap a GPLv2 header on code that was previously under BSD), it's rude. Don't do it. b) it's frequently not legal. Don't "fix" someone's license if you don't believe it is the proper license under this policy. Revert the code instead. 4. GPLv3 usage is still largely an undecided matter, and we ask that committers not use this license in any GPLv2+ licensed extension or in core. I believe that some extensions may be checked in under this license, but we're avoiding it for WMF-created work, simply because of the one-way nature of the decision to move to it. 5. Anyone can contribute to anyone else's code under the stated license for that code, with no other strings attached.
Don't take the above as gospel...that's just pretty much the set of assumptions I've been operating under, and I suspect it's more-or-less what others are operating under as well. We can have a debate right here in this thread about whether this is the right policy to have, but I'm not faulting anyone for making these assumptions. There may also be extensions that don't adhere to this policy. If there are, we should probably have a discussion about why that is, and what (if anything) we should do about them.
On "GPL version 2 or later", what is meant by that is that the license header explicitly say that the file is licensed as GPL "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.". Not "choose whatever version of the GPL you want".
Olivier, I'm sorry this wasn't clearly communicated to you until now. If having copyright assignment is a requirement for your extension, I suggest you host your extension elsewhere.
Rob [1] http://blog.robla.net/2010/thoughts-on-dual-licensing-and-contrib-agreements...