[QGIS-Developer] iOS prototyping

[Matthias Kuhn]

Am I too late for the party? Probably.

Anyway...

>From what I can see there are different sides to this discussion:

* Is a (potential) license change feasible

This question is very hard to answer since there are a lot of
stakeholders and uncertainties attached to it.

I don't know, apparently it has successfully been done before on other
projects (see VLC). I'm not gonna go into much more detail here, as I
don't think I'll be able to help much in finding a final answer here.
The only way to find this answer will be to actually try.

* Is a (potential) license change something we want

This is a question to be answered from each developer's individual
standpoint.

There are so many things in QGIS, where the project structures (with
PSC, voting members and community involved) play a huge rule in what I
do and what happens to the code I wrote. As you all know, I'm still
around, so you can interpret that I am in general happy with what's
happening. All in all, I have a huge trust in these structures. In fact,
I think I tell people similarly often how proud I am of our projects
structures as I tell them about how proud I am of the product itself. I
truly believe, that these structures are sustainable enough to withstand
an unfriendly takeover.

The past has also shown, that forks kept in private (n.b. in a GPL
compliant way) could not stop the main and completely open QGIS to be
the thing that people actually want. The most important part license
wise for me is, that QGIS is freely available for anyone on whatever
platform wherever he may be and that he is able to use its functionality
and adjust it to his needs if he wishes to do so.

Given that, I would seriously consider to give the PSC the power to
adjust the license for good reasons. Ask me and you'll have good chances
to get that. At least I know that in the "worst case" and (totally
unexpected) abuse of those rights we're still be able to fork under the
GPL terms.

Last but not least, a license has been chosen by a person or a group of
people at a given point in time. Knowledge at this point in time by the
people in charge is what is taken into account when choosing a license.
The outside world can move on and change and new requirements to
licenses can come up which are not covered by the original license.

An example: it should be possible to provide QGIS as a service via a
remote desktop like cloud platform and change whatever you want without
being forced to publish the source code with the current license (Note:
I'm not a lawyer). At the same time it's really hard to distribute QGIS
based public code to Apple tablets with the current license (Note: I'm
not a lawyer). Personally I'd prefer things to be vice versa.

Best regards

Matthias

On 11/10/18 3:55 PM, Greg Troxel wrote:

> Paolo Cavallini <cavallini at faunalia.it> writes:
>
>> thanks for this discussion. I'm also pretty sure getting a property
>> transfer from all developers will be difficult if not impossible (quite
>> a few devs even disappeared from the radar, not easy to find them again).
>>
>> A possible intermediate step would be to:
>>
>> * get the transfer of code property to QGIS.ORG only from those
>> developers who are happy to do it
> That makes sense, but wrapped up in that question is:
>
>   what is the reciprocal covenant about future licensing that goes with
>   the copyright assignment?
>
> or perhaps you really mean "assignment with no reciprocal covenant at
> all, from those who are happy to do it".
>
> The FSF assignment form that my company executed long ago (for
> contributions to GNU Radio) had a covenant to make the code available
> under Free licenses (and I can't remember the exact details), plus a
> grant back to the contributor of a license under copyright law.
>
> This text is old, but is an example
>
>   The Foundation promises that all distribution of the Work, or of any
>   work "based on the Work," that takes place under the control of the
>   Foundation or its assignees, shall be on terms that explicitly and
>   perpetually permit anyone possessing a copy of the work to which the
>   terms apply, and possessing accurate notice of these terms, to
>   redistribute copies of the work to anyone on the same terms. These
>   terms shall not restrict which members of the public copies may be
>   distributed to. These terms shall not require a member of the public
>   to pay any royalty to the Foundation or to anyone else for any
>   permitted use of the work they apply to, or to communicate with the
>   Foundation or its agents in any way either when redistribution is
>   performed or on any other occasion.
>
>> * ask a more specific question to others (e.g. are you willing to move
>> from GPL2 to GPL3?).
>>
>> I think this is more feasible, will help building trust, will help
>> moving forward, and will make it easier (less people to contact) to do
>> further changes in the future.
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