[Mailman-Developers] mailman / archive-ui / licensing questions

[Barry Warsaw]

On Apr 02, 2012, at 08:04 PM, David Jeske wrote:

>The question i "would you BUNDLE another archiver even if the licenses
>don't match?"

If you're donating the archiver to the GNU Mailman project, for us to
maintain, release, bundle, and develop, then I think that would be a very high
hurdle to overcome.  Sorry, but it just is.

I really don't want our developers to have to think about whether they can
copy a chunk of useful code from the archiver to the core.  Or whether they
can refactor some web-ui code, developed under the GPLv3+, and re-use it as a
library in the S-BSD licensed archiver code base.  I know with absolute
certainty that I personally don't want to have to think about stuff like
that.  Do you really want to spend your time trying to figure out all the
insane legalistic conundrums that's going to bring up?

>My archiver has been available for download (like many others) for ten
>years. All these sites are still running a limping pipermail archive,
>because it's bundled. I want to get Mailman a better bundled archive.

Which is fantastic, and which I fully encourage.

One of the reasons why Pipermail is so ubiquitous is that it was bundled with
Mailman 2.1.  But another reason is that it was so painful to replace.
Mailman 3's architecture fixes the latter, and `bzr rm` fixed the former.

>HOWEVER, I personally will not write GPL code. I might submit a tiny patch
>or bugfix, but I'm simply opposed to restrictions on how someone uses
>something that I'm trying to donate to the software community. (i.e. you're
>never going to turn me into a mailman developer, the best you'd get is me
>writing my own mailman-ish and releassing it under S-BSD.. if you want
>that, let me know)

I'm not going to spend time on this list arguing for the GPL.  The bottom line
is that the core, and by extension the web ui, are GPLv3+ and that cannot be
changed.  Having a different licensing and ownership regime for one component
of the project will make our lives more difficult, and drain resources from
developers who would rather hack than worry about legal crap.

Probably the only way I'd change my mind about that is if RMS personally told
us that we could still treat the non-copyleft donation the same way we treat
all the other code, i.e. we can use the code and freely copy between them
without any additional administrative overhead.

Cheers,
-Barry