Re: Mauve license

[Tom Tromey <tromey at redhat dot com>]

>>>>> "Stuart" == Stuart Ballard <stuart.a.ballard@gmail.com> writes:

Stuart> This is slightly strange to me. We (the Free Software community) are
Stuart> forced to make our own test suite because Sun won't release theirs
Stuart> under terms we can use, but when we do write our own, we put it under
Stuart> a license that prevents even other Free Software projects from working
Stuart> with it. Our test suite is under a stronger copyleft than Classpath
Stuart> itself is!

My recollection of our thinking, back when we started Mauve, was that
surely the GPL would be fine, since nobody would be creating derived
works and since we wanted the result to be free software.  And, since
we were heavily in the GNU world in those days, the default license
was the GPL, and we saw no reason to change it.

Of course we didn't anticipate today's weird world where people are
working on free software but have an allergic reaction to the GPL,
even for a package which has never had a release, and likely never
will.

Stuart> I understand why we want Classpath itself to be copyleft. But what on
Stuart> earth benefit are we getting from preventing people from
Stuart> "proprietarizing" our testsuite?

I've actually had a query from a group that wanted to make a
proprietary fork of mauve (after translating it to C++).  Their plans
didn't do much to induce me to want to change.

Stuart> My understanding is that a license change could be difficult to effect
Stuart> at this point because I don't think a copyright assignment has been
Stuart> required for Mauve contributions and therefore there are probably a
Stuart> lot of copyright holders, some of whom may be difficult to track down.

Yes, I put the chances of this happening quite low.
We've certainly had difficulty doing this with libffi, which is a much
smaller project.

Tom