Volumio2 Licence change

It’s now the time that Volumio2 will have its licence, why didn’t I put it yet?
I was considering into changing it… And I think that everybody (especially contributors) should tell their opinion on this.
See this conversation:https://github.com/volumio/Volumio2/pull/67

Some things worth considering:

  • This will affect the github.com/volumio/Volumio2/blo … ckage.json
  • The licence should encourage fully FOSS behaviour
  • Optionally (but not in any way mandatory, if not we won’t talk about FOSS) a credit note should be mentioned if someone uses the code (I think educated people always give proper credits, but found many many bad behaviours in that sense, that’s why I would like to “encourage” it).
  • Since Volumio will be distributed with a mix of open, proprietary and mixed-licence code, ideally we should allow that
  • Sticking with GPL as previous version is not a problem at all, only if there is room for improvements, let’s talk about it !

I think that GPLv3 has the goal of actively spreading itself and it is actually a way to IMPOSE the ideals of the FSF on every project, therefore trying to force openness (and THAT kind of “openness”) on everyone. I always suggest anything but that one.

MIT and Open Source License are very good alternatives, I used them for small projects I did in the past. Apache is also similar, at a certain point they differ in details.

If you really want, do like Linus Torvalds did, specify explicitly GPLv2, without the point where the user is free to choose any following version of it (it’s one of the points of GPL).

I’m in favour of the MIT license. It is the most common one and everyone knows that the work one puts into the project actually serves the greater good and doesn’t get locked up in some way. Speaking of credit: volumio2 itself uses a lot of npm packages (39 currently -> david-dm.org/volumio/Volumio2/) that are responsible for a huge part of volumio’s functionality… yet the authors of those are mostly never mentioned in regard to the volumio project…

As per the credits, don’t worry we’ll give credits to every single contributor and every single author of modules (didn’t do that yet, since it’s not been released… ). Look at the credits section on Volumio, we always list everyone.

Speaking with some contributors, it seems that Gplv3 will be the preferred version. I’m sending out messages to all contributors to see if they agree with that choice.

So do you guys agree with Gplv3?