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UltraStar-Deluxe / USDX

The free and open source karaoke singing game UltraStar Deluxe, inspired by Sony SingStar™
https://usdx.eu
GNU General Public License v2.0
855 stars 161 forks source link

switch to GPLv3? RFC #40

Open basisbit opened 8 years ago

basisbit commented 8 years ago

a couple of people suggested to me to switch the license to GPLv3 to better protect the project against not-intended / not free and open source minded usage of the game. This would also allow us to include code from other GPLv3 based projects and we would still be able to include "GPLv2 and later" code.

I will check the licenses of used libraries for compatibility within the next days/weeks.

What do you think of possibly switching UltraStar Deluxe to GPLv3? This is an open and community based project, thus in my opinion it is essential to only switch the license if you all are ok with that and that we all agree on that for whatever reasons.

Currently USDX is licensed as "GPLv2 or later".

AlexanderS commented 8 years ago 
 * This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or
 * modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License
 * as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 2
 * of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

Currently we are GPLv2 or later. So technically it should not be a problem to switch to GPLv3 even if we cannot reach all former contributors.

brianch commented 8 years ago

I'm definitely not an expert on licensing, but I don't think it would be a good idea, there is no clear benefit from it, I don't think the extra clauses make that much a difference for USDX, and the use of third party GPLv3 code is just a possibility, nothing concrete (and on the other hand, we wouldn't be able to use "GPLv2 only" code anymore).

But more importantly, switching would make our code incompatible with GPLv2 and so projects that use it would be unable to benefit from our code, in the other hand, staying "GPLv2 or later" enable USDX code to be used both in GPLv2 and GPLv3 projects.

basisbit commented 8 years ago

would allow us to make use of libraries like https://github.com/FlibbleMr/neolib

basisbit commented 8 years ago

also, this would be mandatory for including acinerella. @brianch could you maybe join the irc channel again if you have some spare time?

basisbit commented 8 years ago

closing this issue and not changing to GPL v3 for now

basisbit commented 6 years ago

I'd like to reevaluate this topic. What changed: there are some nice improvements in https://github.com/ultrastares/usdxworldparty/tree/alfa that we could adopt to improve the game. Also, this would solve the issue that freetype freesans now is licensed GPLv3+ which stops us from updating that dependency. Please comment this.

bohning commented 6 years ago

I really don't know enough about licenses to make a qualified comment. As a license noob, I really don't see the actual implications, benefits and downsides to it. With respect to FreeType, this would definitely be a benefit.

s09bQ5 commented 6 years ago

I highly doubt using and distributing FreeSans forces us to switch USDX to GPLv3. https://www.gnu.org/software/freefont/license.html explicitly states that users merely displaying the font do not have to concern themselves with the license terms.

And even if it did force us to license USDX as GPLv3, having all sources of USDX licensed as GPLv2+ is enough. Only the compiled binary would need to use GPLv3 as its license. We would then of course have to reject all contributions done as GPLv2-only and only link to libraries that are GPLv3-compatible. We could also do it like FFmpeg and provide a compile time option to enable features that combined result in an undistributable binary.

basisbit commented 6 years ago

@s09bQ5 there is still the sentence However anyone distributing the font software as software separately from the document, even if the way the font software was obtained was to extract it from a document, would have to comply with the GNU GPL[v3]. I am not a lawyer and on that other issue we found no one who could state a definitive answer.

you mention "reject all contributions done as GPLv2-only" and I would always vote for rejecting such things anyways because these would make the whole project GPLv2-only once the next release happened. So far, the interesting libraries I saw all were either GPLv3+ or GPLv2+ and thus would be fine to use in a GPLv3+ project. Please mention any GPLv2 only libraries that seem promising or maybe already are part of USDX. Not switching to GPLv3+ would result in additional workload. At least I personally prefer to work on fun stuff instead of spending the time on reengineering the changes that some fork already has done.

Please throw in some reasons against switching to GPLv3+. Maybe even stuff related to the license itself.

s09bQ5 commented 6 years ago

That sentence wants to tell us that we have to comply with the GPLv3 by providing the source code for FreeSans to everyone who wants to have it, etc. It has no effect on other files that are distributed together with the font. I don't mind switching to GPLv3 as long as we don't regret that we can no longer use GPLv2 libraries (most are LGPL anyways). There is a nice compatibility matrix at https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#AllCompatibility