[Qgis-psc] iOS links [was PSC Meeting March]

[Tim Sutton]

Hi



> On 18 Mar 2020, at 16:40, Even Rouault <even.rouault at spatialys.com> wrote:
> 
> On mercredi 18 mars 2020 17:25:19 CET Andreas Neumann wrote:
>> Hi Paolo,
>> 
>> From what I remember from the discussion yesterday, the idea is to stay
>> with GPL, but add exceptions for distributions in app stores.
>> 
>> Tim correct me if I'm wrong.
>> 
>> Wasn't sure if this means a general exception for all existing and future
>> (to come) app stores, or if we need to specifically mention them, e.g. iOS
>> Apple app store (or however this thing is called). What if the terms of
>> these app stores are totally against our values?
> 
> IHMO, the (pain of the) process of having all contributors accept to adding an 
> exception to the GPL would be quite similar as completely changing license.
> If that's considered, then switching to something non-copyleft like BSD, MIT 
> or Apache, etc might be more relevant to avoid any future pain. See this post 
> by Paul Ramsey:
> http://blog.cleverelephant.ca/2010/04/on-road-to-damascus-gpl-to-bsd.html (not 
> necessarily his conclusion but the discussion on the merits of GPL vs other 
> licenses)

Yes we floated the idea but the suggestion got drowned in a bunch of knee-jerk reactions without anyone taking time to contemplate it properly. I think for too many people, open source (and in particular their choice of GPL as preferred license) has become a fanatical religion and they lost sight of why we make  open source software - to collaborate freely and spread our work far and wide. Often the arguments get framed in ‘wrongs and rights’ and ‘ethics’ rather than in values and what will serve our needs well. In our prior discussions we floated a range of possibilities (all of which except 0 involve of course getting sign off from every developer or replacing their contributions):

0) Do nothing, live with brain dead stuff like not being able to publish our work in app stores
1) Simple license tweak as proposed in this thread (to confirm your question Andreas).
2) Change of license to e.g. BSD/MIT something else
3) Ceding ownership of all code to QGIS.org (and requiring so for all future contributions) so that licenses changes (after due process in accordance with our governance guidelines) could be made as needed.

Unfortunately what generally happens in these discussions is that a few loud voices kill the discussion (usually supporting some kind of FUD statement like ’The PSC wants to run away with the IP and make random changes to the license’ etc. and nobody wants to get into an argument so important discussions get dropped.

*sigh*

Personally, I would like to aim for 3 above, but probably we will get 0 or (if we do a lot of work tracking down devs) maybe 1. But most of all I would like whatever route we take to be an informed choice supported by an informed and open discussion. Our license must serve our work…not hold us hostage. I think at the very least, we should make an effort to contact all our contributors who still have actively used code in the code base, and a) see if they are still out there and b) poll them on their willingness to introduce changes to our license, whether it be 0 or 4 on the scale above.

Regards

Tim


> 
> Even
> 
> -- 
> Spatialys - Geospatial professional services
> http://www.spatialys.com
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---

Tim Sutton
tim at qgis.org




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