[Advisors] Thoughts on a license change.

[John Mark Walker]

----- Original Message -----

> Yes, ideally. How ever, linking to older GPLv2 code may be problematic with
> Apache License. QEMU is GPLv2.

Of the reasons against, this is the one that gives me pause. Our signature feature that went into 3.4 was the QEMU integration. We cannot, under any circumstance, do anything to jeopardize that collaboration. I'm not entirely sure what the consequences are of linking Apache-licensed code to GPLv2 libraries. I can ask for a report on that and present the results here. 

Otherwise, I'm generally in favor of the move. I used to be a huge fan of copyleft, but over the years I've seen that community governance and development process seem to mean a whole lot more than which license a project chooses. 

I'd be very curious if anyone here strongly disagrees with a move to the Apache License 2.0, the QEMU integration issue notwithstanding. 

-JM 

> On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 11:07 AM, David Nalley < david at gnsa.us > wrote:

> > Personally, I see dual-licensing as being better, but not ideal. It
> 
> > still leaves a lot of confusion on the part of the non-FOSS-zealots.
> 
> > I'd personally advocate for a single permissive license.
> 

> > --David
> 

> > On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 1:54 PM, Anand Babu Periasamy
> 
> > < abperiasamy at gmail.com > wrote:
> 
> > > I cannot agree more. I have been advocating to dual-license or re-license
> 
> > > GlusterFS under Apache Software License v2 for the last two years. GPL
> 
> > > defends freedom strongly, but hurts adoption. Folks at Red Hat care about
> 
> > > software freedom more than adoption. Lets push it once again.
> 
> > > -ab
> 
> > >
> 
> > >
> 
> > > On Sat, Aug 10, 2013 at 8:40 AM, John Mark Walker < johnmark at johnmark.org
> > > >
> 
> > > wrote:
> 
> > >>
> 
> > >> Adding advisors list.
> 
> > >>
> 
> > >> On Aug 10, 2013 11:16 AM, "David Nalley" < david at gnsa.us > wrote:
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Hi folks,
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Just tossing out a question or two.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> So I'd like to propose that we consider changing to either the ASLv2,
> 
> > >>> MIT, or BSD licenses.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Why? So I personally strongly identify with copyleft principles, but
> 
> > >>> my experience in the past few years are that the practical and
> 
> > >>> irrational concerns around licensing hurt adoption and hurt
> 
> > >>> contribution.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Specifically, I found that several very large enterprises (~100k
> 
> > >>> employees each) said that they never even considered CloudStack at the
> 
> > >>> time because it was licensed under a GPL license. The dual-licensing
> 
> > >>> bit muddies the waters a bit rather than helps. For the folks who are
> 
> > >>> educated very well in open source, it's great. For folks who aren't as
> 
> > >>> sophisiticated in OSS licensing it's merely confusing.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Second - there's the potential damper on contribution. Despite how
> 
> > >>> long GPL has been around, much FUD still remains around copyleft
> 
> > >>> licensing; and that keeps people employed by large corporate users
> 
> > >>> from contributing (at least that has been my experience) The more
> 
> > >>> enlightened understand that it isn't going to virally apply to
> 
> > >>> anything that they develop, but there is still a substantial number of
> 
> > >>> companies that simply don't get it.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Finally - I don't see a downside to becoming more permissively
> 
> > >>> licensed aside from the work involved. Moving to a single, liberal
> 
> > >>> open source license has the potential for us to increase our community
> 
> > >>> size, both user and contributor. And from a weird marketing angle,
> 
> > >>> it's also likely, as a one time event, to drive some interest in the
> 
> > >>> project, as relicensing events tend to be geeky news that attracts
> 
> > >>> attention.
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> Having done it once, I know it's a ton of work to get all of the
> 
> > >>> contributors to agree to relicense. That said, what are the collective
> 
> > >>> thoughts on this?
> 
> > >>>
> 
> > >>> --David
> 
> > >>> _______________________________________________
> 
> > >>> Board mailing list
> 
> > >>> Board at gluster.org
> 
> > >>> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/board
> 
> > >>
> 
> > >>
> 
> > >> _______________________________________________
> 
> > >> Board mailing list
> 
> > >> Board at gluster.org
> 
> > >> http://supercolony.gluster.org/mailman/listinfo/board
> 
> > >>
> 
> > >
> 
> > >
> 
> > >
> 
> > > --
> 
> > > -ab
> 
> > >
> 
> > > Imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein
> 

> --
> -ab

> Imagination is more important than knowledge --Albert Einstein

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