Re: Distribution Naming System

[Sébastien Wilmet <swilmet gnome org>]

On Mon, Apr 07, 2014 at 10:11:29AM +0100, Emmanuele Bassi wrote:
> I think that yes: the GNOME website should link back to the GNU
> website in the "about" section. care to file a bug?

Done:
https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=727740

> > We can also upgrade our software licences to the GPLv3 and LGPLv3.
>
> "we" as in...?

GNOME developers and maintainers.

> basically all parts of the GNOME stack are licensed under (L)GPLv2 or
> later already, and some of it are under (L)GPLv3 or later. even if we
> don't take the "or later" at face value, re-licensing our platform is
> going to be impossible: we don't have copyright assignment (for a lot
> of good reasons) and in some cases some contributors do not exist any
> more, making the re-licensing effort a non-starter.

I don't understand. If the licence mentions "or later", I thought it was 
possible to upgrade to a later version without asking to every 
contributors, since the contributors have agreed on the "or later".

> on top of that, the v2 has given us the widest adoption possible, and
> unlike other entities we cannot re-license dual-license for commercial
> work. I personally don't want to see the ecosystem of companies using
> GNOME technologies dwindle even more.

If you refer to proprietary software when you say "commercial work", the 
GNOME libraries are anyway in LGPL AFAIK, so companies can build 
proprietary software on top of GTK+ for example.

And I don't understand how an upgrade to the (L)GPLv3 would be a decline 
for the GNOME ecosystem.

But I'm far from an expert in licences, so it's probably more 
complicated than I think.

Sébastien