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

[Debajyoti Bera <dbera web gmail com>]

> > 	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 unless I'm very out of date with my software licensing knowledge, so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.

That does sound possible. After all, theoretically (e.g.) Debian is free is 
take the beagle tarball and release it under the GPLv3 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.

No, I don't have any such intention.

> 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! :)

Nops ... Mirco 'meebey' Bauer of Debian brought it to my attention on the IRC. 
Mirco... any comments ?

- dBera

-- 
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Debajyoti Bera @ http://dtecht.blogspot.com
beagle / KDE / Mandriva / Inspiron-1100