[jdev] Jabberd 1.4.x license concerns/questions

[Tijl Houtbeckers]

On Fri, 01 Apr 2005 19:02:08 +0200, Peter Saint-Andre <stpeter at jabber.org>  
wrote:

> 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.

If Mattias decides to do a GPL only release that is no problem. With dual  
licencing, at any time you can decide to "fork" the codebase and go on  
with a GPL only version. You do not have to have ownership of the code for  
that. So I guess what it comes down to is, does anyone use or care about  
Jabberd1.4 being JOSL?

Ofcourse, Jamin could always decide to do this himself, but then he'd have  
to remove the JOSL licence every time there is a new release (you could  
probably script that).

Note that, whoever publishes anything under JOSL will still be bound under  
those terms. However this weird requirment is probably void if you publish  
packages that include the source (which Mattias does probably, just a  
tarball with the source). So to make the life of packagers like Jamin  
easier, if I were Mattias I would go with GPL only from now, unless  
someone desperatly needs JOSL.