On Sun, Feb 8, 2015 at 7:59 PM, Rob Lanphier robla@wikimedia.org wrote:
Our code is "GPLv2 or later", which is the functional equivalent of being multi-licensed under GPLv2 and GPLv3 (and all later versions of the GPL) Therefore, the set of licenses that "GPLv2 or later" is compatible with is a strict superset of the licenses that "GPLv3 or later" is compatible with.
This is not true. The GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible licenses, and if you read the actual license disclaimer, you will see it is not the "functional equivalent" of having our code licensed under both.
Rather, what the disclaimer says is that our code is GPLv2 only, *but*, anybody who modifies or distributes it is free to, at their discretion, change the license to any later version of the GPL. You legally cannot have both the GPLv2 and GPLv3 because they are conflicting in their terms.
Two responses:
- Because that makes our code incompatible with any GPLv2-only code out
there. 2. Why is it a good idea?
In general, our licensing choices should be driven by goals, and it's unclear what goals are met by moving to GPLv3. It's also unclear what goals any version of the GPL is actually serving in this particular context (due to the nature of PHP server side code) but relicensing MediaWiki at this late stage (beyond v2->later version) is not really a practical option, so I don't feel the need to belabor this particular point.
I've already described the numerous changes and fixes that have been made in the GPLv3, specifically easier enforcement due to changed policies on infringement, better international wording, etc. If you'd like to dispute any of the good ideas I've listed, then go ahead, but I think the improvements v3 makes are more than enough of a goal.
As for your point on it being useless because of the server-side nature of PHP, I semi-agree, which is why I proposed the AGPL, but nonetheless the advantages of the v3 will still help distributors who download MediaWiki from our site. The server-side nature of PHP has nothing to do with it.
That decision isn't final, and in fact, as Gabriel noted on that bug, he's working with the other contributors to relicense it under the Apache 2.0 license, per a conversation that a bunch of us had at WMF.
In general, we should think about what goal we're trying to address by using GPLv2+ or GPLv3+ or any other license for that matter. My personal experience has been that any contribution that has been compelled by license rather than given of enlightened self interest is done grudgingly and in a rather useless fashion. There are certainly copyleft success stories (e.g. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenWrt), but for MediaWiki, it's unclear under what possible scenario we'd want to compel GPL compliance from anyone that wasn't already motivated to work with us as an upstream.
In general, I believe we should move more of our licensing toward Apache 2.0. It seems to provide a nice tradeoff between simplicity and providing some basic legal protections for the projects.
That is quite depressing to hear. MediaWiki is supposed to be an open source software movement, so I would think one of the goals of our community would be to preserve that and keep MediaWiki open source, but if the WMF has some future goals to make its software proprietary, then I can understand why we might want to aim toward something that allows that, such as the permissive Apache 2.0.
*-- * *Tyler Romeo* Stevens Institute of Technology, Class of 2016 Major in Computer Science