Re: Source-Navigator moves to SourceForge!

[Mo DeJong <supermo@bayarea.net>]

On Wed, 1 May 2002 09:50:20 +0900
"Paul Selormey" <paul@toolscenter.org> wrote:

> Hello Mo,
> What I do not understand here is that, you or the other former
> members of the team do not favor GPL. Or is there more to it?

This has nothing to do with the GPL. Only the copyright holder can relicense a given body of code, so the code hosted on Source-Forge will continue to be licensed under the terms of the GPL. The sticking point was the additional requirement to assign the copyright for contributed code to Red Hat. This is unacceptable since it means that Red Hat could take the existing GPLed code and relicense it to a third party under non free terms.

Assume for example that you wrote a really stunning autoconf/automake/libtool interface for Source-Navigator. If you assign the copyright to Red Hat, then they would be within their rights to take that code and sell a proprietary version of it. I am not accusing Red Hat of anything, but the possibility is something that none of the development team members could accept.

For example, consider the new and improved parsers that Khamis has been working on.

http://oimanager.de/sn.htm

These parsers can't be merged into the Red Hat distributed version of Source-Navigator because of this misguided policy. Khamis has to take it upon himself to distribute a new version of Source-Navigator just to work around the issue. I would rather see this time and effort going into improving one code base instead of spreading it out over multiple ones.

> Now, how does the move to SourceForge helps the license issue?

Moving Source-Navigator to SourceForge does not change the license at all. What it does do is get rid of the need for contributors to give up their copyrights. A contributor only needs to agree to license any code under the terms of the GPL. It also means that the developers can actually check changes into the CVS again. Now that both Ian and I no longer work at Red Hat, there is nobody left to check in patches or even process copyright assignments.

Many attempts were made to resolve this issue and continue to host the project on sources.redhat.com. These attempts did not bear any fruit, rehosting the project was the only viable solution.

cheers
Mo DeJong