Confusion Mounts Over Wayland's Actual License

[GreatEmerald]

I don't see the FAQ being legally binding. The license in each file's header is.

It's not legally binding, per se, but a case could be made that it was made to disinform contributors to get them sign a license they didn't know they were signing.

[mctylr]

As the FSF point out, there is not a singular version of the "MIT License," which tends to refer to either one of the historic forms of the X11 License, sometime including the XFree86 variations, or the Expat License. These are very similar, with the X11 license including the X Window System trademark claim, and a no endorsement clause (others cannot use X Consortium name in advertising).

Of course to make compound confusion FSF and OSI can't agree on the license names, as what FSF calls Expat license, OSI calls the MIT license.

While I'm glad to see people track down and clear up confusion and eliminate needlessly [mostly trivial] variants of license usage; such license discussions (debian-legal being the classic forum) are at risk of falling into the realm of hair-splitting trivia, where trolls and other poisonous people often lurk.

[Calinou]

On #fsf @ chat.freenode.net:

<+jgay> I have added a new license to the Directory: <http://directory.fsf.org/wiki/Licens..._and_Disclaime r>
<+jgay> It is also now linked to from our license-list: <http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#HPND>
<+jgay> Thank you Calinou for directing our attention to this

The HPND appears to be free and GPL-compatible.

[utack]

Yes. So does the HPND license and all BSD and Apache licenses.

Why would you choose a license that allows anyone to take your code for their purposes without giving back the improvements made to it?

[caligula]

Why would you choose a license that allows anyone to take your code for their purposes without giving back the improvements made to it?

If you want popularity? Kiss peoples' buttocks? Don't care. Many reasons. Using copyleft is fine if you understand what you're doing. Also using BSD/MIT is okay for the same reasons. However religious crap talk around licenses isn't. I hate how the license discussion every time brings up the copyleft vs MIT/BSD/PD issue.

[Chaz]

Why would you choose a license that allows anyone to take your code for their purposes without giving back the improvements made to it?

Because they want it to become very widely adopted and be used as a standard, including by businesses producing nonfree software (maybe they'd like those businesses to make free software instead but they can't force them to do that) or which want the ability to fork a nonfree version in future. Plus sometimes even when the code is open source (maybe in a half hearted way) companies still strongly prefer that code be under permissive licenses like Apache or MIT instead of GPL so they don't have to worry at all about legal restrictions. The Wayland devs care about Wayland compatibility and adoption more than getting companies to open up their code. It's the same reason some stuff is released under LGPL instead of GPL, only MIT is even less restrictive.

[randomizer]

Why would you choose a license that allows anyone to take your code for their purposes without giving back the improvements made to it?

It's not like copyleft really helps anyway. Plenty of companies don't even adhere to expensive proprietary licences properly so I'd say there are also plenty using GPL code in non-free software. Unless you audit them all it's pretty easy to get away with any licence violations. Just look at how much software is probably floating around that violates the licence of code posted on StackOverflow (CC-BY-SA)!

[PyroDevil]

I find it interesting that when you use license scanners like FOSSology, you find about 300 different licenses within the linux kernel.

[PyroDevil]

wayland is run by big companies with rooms full of lawyers. with help of the fsf that should be very easy to sort out without the need to go adhominem at the volunteer that found the mistake your project did.

The problem is that lawyers have to be made aware of the issues by the developers and developers often don't really understand the issues with using/developing open source software in commercial products.

[Calinou]

The problem is that lawyers have to be made aware of the issues by the developers and developers often don't really understand the issues with using/developing open source software in commercial products.

Please don't imply commercial software is proprietary, or that all proprietary software is commercial. Sometimes, proprietary software is developed at no charge, and free/libre software is developed and sold.