[QGIS-Developer] iOS prototyping

[Nyall Dawson]

On Mon, 29 Oct 2018 at 01:22, Tim Sutton <tim at kartoza.com> wrote:

> One (probably unpopular and definitely tedious if not impossible) option might be for us to add an exception to the GPL license used for QGIS allowing its distriibuton via app stores, get every committer who has code in the current codebase to agree to the exception and build iOS packages off that. Though that would still leave a large issue of the dependent libraries that we use that are under GPL where the latter approach is even less feasible. So while I am excited at the idea of running QGIS on my iPad / iPhone I am wondering if this is a dead-end excursion in terms of making QGS generally available on iOS?
>

This is opening a complete can of worms... but I've wondered for a
while if we need to set up a contributor agreement which grants
copyright of code to the QGIS organisation, so that we have the
flexibility to relicense QGIS in future if (and ONLY IF!!)
required***. Currently we are stuck with the GPLv2 or later license
forever, but I can definitely see a time when we'd like to drop the
"v2" and move to a pure "v3 or greater" license, or even relicense
under something more permissive like the MIT license.

I see this "stuck with the GPLv2 license FOREVER AND EVER" as a
potential risk to the project. There's many other open source licenses
to choose from, including some which MAY be much better to suited for
the project. But I feel confident that with the right approach,
careful wording, and legal fine print we could, at this stage of the
project, get agreement from all current contributors to a copyright
transfer agreement. So I'd like us to at least have a nice discussion
about whether this is a good idea or not.

Nyall

*** Hey Trolly mcTrollface: I'm not ever saying QGIS should go closed
source. Go take your annoying breed of community troublemaking
elsewhere and let us keep this discussion civil and based on facts
only.