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

[David Jeske]

I think the last several messages covered whats-what pretty well.
Summarizing what already seems to have been reclarified a few times
excellently by others... ClearSilver List Archive is S-BSD, and will remain
so. That license allows you folks to wrap it in GPLv3 if you wish, but I
won't be doing so myself or assigning copyright as I don't wish those
restrictions to be enforced on my code.

I apologize that this license discussion has lasted as long as it has, as
I'm sure we'd all rather be talking about cool archiver UI code and
features. :)

The only remaining question I saw was Barry's here...

On Apr 8, 2012 3:02 PM, "Barry Warsaw" <barry at list.org> wrote:
> David, there's one thing that's not clear to me.  If
> you donated the code to GNU Mailman and
> we bundled it under our banner, would you continue
> to maintain, develop, and release it as a separate
> project?

If MM bundled (some version of) the code, wrapped it in GPLv3, and
maintained it, I don't anticipate I'd maintain, develop, and continue to
release a separate project. I'd merely keep my webpage up distributing the
S-BSD code-release.

If I did make changes, I'd distribute them as S-BSD patches to my S-BSD
code. However, seeing as CSLA hasn't changed in a decade, after I'm done
updating it, my contributions probably wouldn't change for a decade more.

By my view of this entire license and bundling discussion it seems like the
most practical possibilities are:

1) If MM really likes how CSLA ends up, you folks can adopt and GPLv3 the
code, effectively becoming the official maintainers of the project..
(accepting that the GPLv3 restrictions couldn't be enforced on the original
code, as it's also released S-BSD)

2) If MM likes how CSLA ends up, but would rather have me maintain it... I
can maintain it as a separate S-BSD project, and MM can point-to or
reference it as one of the external (yet easy to install) archiver options.

3) If MM doesn't like how CSLA ends up, then we can all have a good laugh
at how much time we spent in theoretical license discussions over something
that didn't matter.

Let's hope not #3. I'm going to have to work extra hard now to be sure that
doesn't happen. :)

I learned more about license nuances and general MM dev thoughts from this
thread that I expected, so thanks too everyone that replied and contributed!