[Savannah-register-public] [task #5917] Submission of ThemeX/Westgen Site-Wide Template Engine

[Stephan Peijnik]

Follow-up Comment #3, task #5917 (project administration):

Hello Brian,

Free Software in itself implies that the program is what people tend to call
'open source software'. 
>From a legal point of view there are various problems 'linking' (ie. loading
a module of) proprietary code into a GPL'ed program. This is strictly
forbidden by the GPL itself and hence is a license violation. However, do you
really need to dual-license your program?


We would really like you to use the 'GPLv2 or later' clause. The main
intention behind using this is that it simplifies the process once the GPLv3
is released. This means if you are not using the 'or later' clause, you would
have to ask every copyright holder of every piece of sourcecode for
permission, which could and for sure would cause problems. 
If you want to review the draft of the GPLv3, please go to
http://gplv3.fsf.org/. Also, if you do have any concerns, feel free to state
them. Basically, the GPLv3 is only an update to the GPLv2, keeping the very
idea behind the license the same and only rewording or elaborating a bit more
on some problems that came up since the relase of version 2 (such as DRM and
software patents).
Please also have a look at
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#VersionTwoOrLater, which contains a
lot of information on why we insist on using 'v2 or later'.


Now about the legal issues we would be checking for. These include:

Checking of both license and copyright header for presence and validity.
Checking for presense of the license text of the license used.

Basically this is done in order to ensure legal correctness and hence
validity. In short it is meant to also ensure that your Free Software program
stays such and cannot be made proprietary software due to missing legal
correctness of, for example, a copyright header.


Last but not least, Tiny-MCE, if licensed under the LGPL, should not pose a
problem.


I hope this clarifies everything.

Regards,

Stephan


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