Gregory Maxwell wrote:
If the intention is for mediawiki to not be
copylefted, why is it
using the GPL at all? Better to not rely on a dodgy corner case of
the license.
I suppose you mean copyleft as in the viral clause, thus excluding
BSD-style licenses and PD. Lee Daniel Crocker and Erik Moeller
explicitly gave all their work on MediaWiki to PD, and I prefer a less
restrictive license for new projects. Copyleft isn't "the intention",
it's the lowest common denominator. All direct contributors are happy
for their work to be distributed under the GPL, and many are happy for
it to be distributed without any restriction. Many indirect
contributors have a similar policy.
FCKEditor, for example, seems to be the source of most of the reported
253 MPL files. But its standard file header is actually a multiple
licensing statement, with GPL, LGPL and MPL.
A PHP license header is put on the top of PHP extension files
automatically by the skeleton generator, complete with a bogus
copyright claim "Copyright (c) 1997-2003 The PHP Group". It generally
doesn't reflect a deliberate choice by the author.
I haven't been able to find the purported Apache License, Artistic
License or CDDL files.
The GPL, being by far the most restrictive free license, seems to be
for people who have reservations about giving their code away. The GPL
seeks to maintain a sense of ownership and control, by restricting
many kinds of derivative reuse and by mandating attribution. I'm not
going to be bullied into making it my preferred license for new code.
-- Tim Starling