[jdev] Jabberd 1.4.x license concerns/questions

[Peter Saint-Andre]

On Fri, Apr 01, 2005 at 09:54:25AM -0700, Jamin W.Collins wrote:
> 
> On Apr 1, 2005, at 1:33 AM, Matthias Wimmer wrote:
> 
> >Jamin W.Collins schrieb am 2005-03-31 19:14:34:
> >>Looking at Jabber.Org's server listing[2], it indicates that the
> >>Jabberd source is licensed under the GPL.  However review of the 1.4.3
> >>(last stable release) files shows that the primary license is the JOSL
> >>with an option to relicense under the GPL only if the existing JOSL
> >>notice is removed and replaced with a GPL notice.
> >
> >Where do you read this? I know that the licencing of jabberd14 is
> >confusing so I might be confused as well. But as far as I can see in
> >licence-header.txt, you only have to remove the JOSL licence if you 
> >want
> >to distribute only under the GPL. If you do not remove it, you will
> >distribute it under both licences.
> 
> For Debian (or myself) distributing under both JOSL and GPL is more or 
> less the problem.  The JOSL requires that I (the person creating the 
> released package) make sure that the source for each version be 
> available for 6-12 months depending on how rapidly releases were made.  
> Since I made the release I'm responsible for the making sure the source 
> for that individual release is available even though Debian is 
> providing the distribution.  The Debian release structure for the 
> unstable and testing distributions can not assure this.  Yet I'm still 
> responsible for it under the JOSL license.   So, my only option would 
> be to make my releases under the GPL only, which would require 
> modifying each and every file.

The dual-licensing goes back a long time. What would be involved in
licensing it solely under the GPL? Obviously the jabberd2 folks did 
that and it seems conceptually simpler than dual-licensing.

Besides, there's a big push on to eliminate all the special licenses
out there and just use a few (GPL + Apache + BSD or whatever). In fact
I told some of the licensing gurus that I would help to eliminate the
JOSL for that very reason (not that any of this is my code!).

Just wondering...

Peter