On Thu, 03 Jan 2008 17:42:59 +0100, Tim Tassonis timtas@cubic.ch wrote:
Jeff Pohlmeyer wrote:
On Jan 2, 2008 6:09 PM, John Gabriele jmg3000@gmail.com wrote:
Another small nit I have is with the "or any later version" clause
Me too. This came from a template I used when starting to write Geany using Anjuta. At this point, I didn't thought about publishing the code at all and so I didn't thought about the licence problem. OTOH, I recently read an article about the GPLv2 vs. GPLv3 problem and the author(a German lawyer) mentioned it isn't applicable in this case because an user can't agree to a licence or contract which isn't already known or even written. The easiest thing would be to remove this phrase but are we allowed to?
in the Geany license - somehow the idea of agreeing to enter into a contract that hasn't been written yet doesn't seem to me like a very wise thing to do. What if GPL-v4 says: "the author agrees to pay all users of this software $1000 USD per bug report" , well, I don't think I want to give users the option of choosing THAT version :-)
I would think that a plugin may well have a different license than geany, as it is not a derivative work of geany. How about starting an endless discussion about derivative works as the linux kernel modules discussion ;-) There, the last word from Linus seems to be: A module is _not_ a derivative work, so the author can choose the license freely.
But of course Enrico would be the one to ask, no me.
Or a lawyer who I'm not. Besides any lethal considerations which I don't know, in my opinion the choice of the licence of plugins is independent from Geany's licence as long as it is compatible with GPLv2. I.e. a plugin can't choose a closed-source licence because it uses code from Geany which is licenced under the GPLv2. In order to so Geany would have been licenced under the LGPL. I'm not completely sure about this but just publish your plugin sources and all should be fine ;-).
But I suggest any further discussion on this topic should be done in a new thread.
Regards, Enrico