openSUSE/catatonit

Is there a special reason for GPLv3+?

Closed this issue · 9 comments

afreof commented

Is there is a special reason for the GPLv3 license? Or could re-licensing this project e.g. under GPLv2+ be considered?

The problem with GPLv3 is that users are not allowed to integrate Catatonit into products whose owner does not have the possibility to recompile Catatonit himself and replace it on the device. For example, in the case of a car, this results in a conflict of objectives: How can you certify the vehicle with software in such a way that you are allowed to drive it on the road, if you have to assume that the owner himself can change something in the software?

Since Linux containers are also becoming more and more important in the area of embedded devices, I think Catatonit would be even more valuable if users were also allowed to integrate it into products.

Actually a change of the license would perhaps still be possible. It would require the approval of all authors.

gsalvatella commented

I agree with the comments from @afreof. catatonit is an important dependency for e.g. podman, which will increasingly be used in embedded systems.

cyphar commented

I completely forgot about this issue... Let me open a PR for a vote. By my count, the only people who need to approve this change are:

Aleksa Sarai <cyphar@cyphar.com>
Andrey Golovizin <ag@sologoc.com>
Giuseppe Scrivano <gscrivan@redhat.com>
Miquel Sabaté Solà <msabate@suse.com>
Thibault Nélis <tnelis@stammed.net>
Valentin Rothberg <vrothberg@suse.com>

And the patches by Andrey Golovizin and Thibault Nélis are small enough (one-line in both cases) that we could revert them in the absolute worst case.

afreof commented

Thank you very much.

giuseppe commented

for trivial contributions, it shouldn't even matter since they are not significant for copyright purposes, e.g. even GNU projects accept such contributions without copyright papers: https://www.gnu.org/prep/maintain/maintain.html#Legally-Significant

cyphar commented

Yeah, I'm aware of the GNU guidelines on legally significant contributions and they're probably right, but I'd prefer to get everyone's approval so we can avoid any legal questions entirely (for one thing, catatonit is much smaller than most GNU projects).

afreof commented

@cyphar Would it help if we open a pull request? Which license would be the preferred one?

cyphar commented

I was trying to decide between GPLv2+ and MPL-2.0. If you're okay with GPLv2+ we can just stick with that?

afreof commented

GPLv2+ is perfect.

gsalvatella commented

Thank you for the effort guys! This makes podman much more usable now.