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

[Paolo Cavallini]

Hi Tim,

Il 22/03/20 17:45, Tim Sutton ha scritto:

> 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 <http://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.

I frankly do not understand these tones. GPL licence allowed us to grow
and prosper for 20 years, it is the most widespread licence for
successful FOSS projects, and many people (right or wrong) simply do not
see the need and urgency to change this.
Let's keep on discussing about the relative merits of various options,
with the friendly tone we have always had.
Cheers.
-- 
Paolo Cavallini - www.faunalia.eu
QGIS.ORG Chair:
http://planet.qgis.org/planet/user/28/tag/qgis%20board/