Re: [Savannah-hackers] CVS and multilicensing for metaprojects on Savannah?

[Joshua Judson Rosen]

Thanks for answering; sorry for taking so long to respond....

I'm not sure that I entirely understand, or that
I communicated properly; when I said "metaproject", I probably implied
something that I didn't mean....

On Thu, Nov 14, 2002 at 11:21:35AM +0000, Jaime E. Villate wrote:
> 
> Our policy is to ask metaprojects to break down into separate
> projects and register them independently. We do not accept
> metaprojects because with our limited human resources we are not
> prepared to handle them.

What extra demands are you expecting?

> For instance it is much more difficult to track down legal licensing
> issues for a metaproject than for several separate smaller projects.

I don't understand--could you expand on this?

Do you mean issues arising just from different modules having
different licenses, or are you expecting a scenario in which there are
ownership-issues, or what?

> With subprojects registered separately, it is also easier to control
> access permisions.

We don't have any special access-control requirements--the component
subprojects are all tightly-coupled enough that it doesn't make sense
to give someone write-access to only -part- of the tree, for example.

Basically, I'm pretty sure that this is a non-issue, for us.

> > there is, however, the possibility that we will decide
> > that, for whatever reason, some of the libraries and/or programs
> > should be distributed under a different license (say, the new BSD
> > license to greater promote public uptake, or the GPL to keep the
> > technology to the free-software community). I haven't been able to
> > find any details about licensing-choices on the Savannah web-site, so
> > I need to ask: would it be possible to specify a multitude of licenses
> > for different subprojects in the same Savannah-project?
> 
> The license choices in Savannah should be obvious.

Well, yes, they -should-..., but they aren't ;)

...

> There are several pointers to them. In short, we accept only
> GPL-compatible licenses.

I presumed that this was the case, and that any of the licenses listed
on gnu.org as being GPL-compatible would be acceptable.

However, my question really wasn't about which licenses could be used
on Savannah projects, but about how they could be combined--how (or
even whether) multiple licenses could be applied to different sections
of a project on Savannah.

> One of the reasons for that requirement is precisely to be able to
> have multiple licenses without conflicts.

OK, see..., this is basically what I wanted to know--whether I could
use multiple licenses on a single Savannah project. Apparently, the
answer is `yes', but this was not really apparent from reading the
Savannah documentation--all I recall it saying was that I'd have to
choose a free-software license, and it sounded like I was only allowed
to have one license to cover everything in the project.

> If you use several GPL compatible licenses for different modules of
> qyour project, your project's license is the one that is the less
> permissive among them. For instance if module A has the new BSD
> license, module B has the GPL license and module C the LGPL
> license. The project's license is GPL

OK, I -think- that I understand this and like the sound of it....

Your example is exactly what I want to be able to do.

When you say "the project's license", do you just mean the license
that's selected during registration to go into Savannah's
project->license mapping? Or is there some legal or other meaning to
this phrase?

> (another reason why you might want to break your project into
> subprojects)

I'm confused: what reason? To prevent by NewBSD-licensed module from
being distributed as GPL-licensed? No, that doesn't make sense....

To avoid frightening potential GPL-fearing users away from using the
NewBSD-licensed modules (because it's not immediately apparent that
they can be taken as NewBSD-licensed)?

-- 
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US.

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