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

[Stephen J. Turnbull]

On Mon, Apr 9, 2012 at 8:27 AM, Blake Winton <bwinton at mozilla.com> wrote:
> On 08-04-12 19:24 , Mark Sapiro wrote:
>>
>> On 04/08/2012 04:14 PM, Blake Winton wrote:
>>>
>>> Would it work for everyone if David licensed the archiver to Mailman
>>> under the GPLv3+?
>>
>> It won't work for David.
>
> Well, that's not exactly what David said.  ;)

No, that *is* what David said, and repeatedly.  He will not license
under GPL, period.

What he has also said is that he would be happy to maintain his
original distribution in parallel to a GPLed branch bundled with
Mailman.  He would be willing to do a (very) small amount of work to
keep them in sync, I believe, but his releases will be under
simplified BSD so any contributions that he is going to maintain must
be licensed that way.

This matters because, in practice, if there are significant
contributions under GPL to the Mailman branch, it will become a real
(though friendly) fork, and we will lose the benefit of David's
maintenance because we'll have to integrate his changes into our
branch.  He won't do that for us any more.

I personally see that as win-win.  Barry doesn't, presumably because
(1) to keep David as maintainer means that contributions either need
to go through him (implicitly making themm BSD), or we'll need to do
some legal dance to explicitly relicense every such contribution BSD
(since in practice our contributor agreement will make any
contribution to Mailman itself GPLv3+ only), which (2) implicitly
gives David veto power over the bundled archiver.

The reason I see it as win-win is that I don't think there will be a
lot of contribution from the current Mailman core to David's archiver.
 There clearly is a lot of enthusiasm for something with social
networking features, and David's archiver doesn't look like a good
platform for that to me.  Eventually, the recommended (and bundled)
archiver will be something else.

> (I'm not proposing he stops releasing it under S-BSD, just that he
> re-licenses the copy in Mailman as GPL.

David doesn't need to do anything.  We just copy the code and release
it in Mailman under the GPLv3+ like the rest of Mailman.  That's just
a special case of the main reason for using a BSD license.

> So he can continue to work on the
> code and release it under a permissive license, but Mailman can also use and
> distribute it. )

There's nothing stopping us from doing that, not even the possibility
of offending David.  That's *why* he uses BSD in the first place, so
we can do that if we want to.

But he won't do it for us.