AGPL for accounting-api for now; LAGPL when it exists; maybe LGPL in a year if LAGPL never happens (was Re: A specific proposal on licensing)

[Josh Berkus]

Bradley,

> Regardless, I will be asking all copyright holders to stay in touch with
> me about this relicensing discussion so that we don't end up in a
> situation where we want to relicense but a drive-by contributor holds us
> up.  I'll have a conversation with every new contributor about this.

Realistically, I think you need a signed document from all copyright
holders *now* if relicensing is to be a realistic goal.  Stuff happens;
people run off to rural Thailand and become hermits, or simply turn into
jerks, and won't relicense their stuff.  Plus the general idea is to get
more contributors, which means more copyright holders. If you don't get
relicensing authority now, you might as well forget about doing it later.

> I see your point about this, and it's a somewhat persuasive argument,
> but for reasons stated above, I think we have to stick with the Affero
> GPL for now.  I welcome a patch to the wiki and the codebase itself that
> summarizes my points above so that people know what we're thinking and
> know that a weak copyleft license for accounting-api is "on its way".

Without legal authority to relicense, that's a fairly empty promise.
It's like "next fiscal year" from a startup.

Speaking as an OSS developer, I'll still be interested in an
NPO-accounting application under the AGPL.  However, if the library
stays under the AGPL, I will lose interest in it for any other purpose,
and would go so far as to say that you might as well not release it as a
separate component.

Since I haven't had time to hack on this so far, that's not much of a
loss to you, except that I believe my perspective is not uncommon.

-- 
Josh Berkus
PostgreSQL Experts Inc.
http://pgexperts.com