Re: Beagle license change proposal from MIT/X11 to GPLv3

[Richard Boulton <richard tartarus org>]

Debajyoti Bera wrote:
> Hi,
> 	Recently we came to know that some distributions have difficulty with the 
> current Beagle license. Specifically, Debian does not recognise 
> Creative-Common Attribution 2.0 (CC-by-2.0) as a valid free software license 
> [1]. However Beagle requires Semweb which is dual licensed under CC-by-2.0 
> and GPLv2-and-later. We used to include Semweb by accepting the CC-by-2.0 
> license. GPLv2 is incompatible with the Apache license (required by 
> Lucene.Net).

I can't quite understand why distributions have a problem taking the 
beagle code under MIT/X11, and combining it with the Semweb stuff under 
GPLv3 (as allowed if Semweb is, as you say, licensed as 
GPLv2-and-later).  MIT/X11 is compatible (in this direction) with GPLv3, 
unless I'm very out of date with my software licensing knowledge, so 
they have a perfect right to do this, don't they?  The resulting 
packages would be under GPLv3, but the source code in beagle's SVN would 
still be under MIT/X11.

I think, therefore, there is no need for Beagle to change its license. 
However, perhaps your intent to change the license to GPLv3 to make it 
more obvious to distributions that they are entitled to create packages 
under the GPLv3.

The potential problem I see, if Beagle changes to GPLv3, is that you 
could conceivably drop the requirement for Semweb in future, but find 
another piece of software which you want to link with which is licensed 
under a license incompatible with GPLv3.  If you've accepted 
contributions to the beagle code under the GPLv3, you'd have to get 
agreement from all contributors for a license change - if you've only 
accepted contributions under MIT/X11, you're very likely to be able to 
stick with that to link with code under any free software license.

> 	Please let me know if there are any alternate suggestions or any comments.

As an outside observer, I'd suggest that you continue to license the 
Beagle code (excluding SemWeb) under MIT/X11; and document the above 
reasoning as to why this means distributions can create packages of 
Beagle+SemWeb under GPLv3.

Is there a debian bug / mailing list thread discussing this issue?  A 
quick search on bugs.debian.org didn't show anything up, but perhaps 
it's hiding somehow! :)

--
Richar