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irungentoo / toxcore

The future of online communications.
https://tox.chat/
GNU General Public License v3.0
8.73k stars 1.26k forks source link

GPL Exception #1064

Closed urras closed 8 years ago

urras commented 9 years ago

In order to publish Antidote in the Apple app store and Test Flight, Toxcore needs to make a GPL exception. However, we need permission to add an exception from the following people who have contributed to Toxcore:

The exception can be viewed here If you hereby agree to these changes, say so in this thread.

ghost commented 9 years ago

K

tylerstillwater commented 9 years ago

Agreed.

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 8:01 AM, mannol notifications@github.com wrote:

K

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub: https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064#issuecomment-55897250

kyconny commented 9 years ago

Agreed. On 17 Sep 2014 14:51, "Urras" notifications@github.com wrote:

In order to publish Antidote https://github.com/dvor/Antidote in the Apple app store and Test Flight, Toxcore needs to make a GPL exception. However, we need permission to add an exception from the following people who have contributed to Toxcore:

The exception can be viewed here https://gist.github.com/urras/02bf85e19e57da7ccd8c/raw If you hereby agree to these changes, say so in this thread.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064.

cgar commented 9 years ago

Agreed.

schuetzm commented 9 years ago

ok

exonity commented 9 years ago

Ok Am 17.09.2014 15:51 schrieb "Urras" notifications@github.com:

In order to publish Antidote https://github.com/dvor/Antidote in the Apple app store and Test Flight, Toxcore needs to make a GPL exception. However, we need permission to add an exception from the following people who have contributed to Toxcore:

The exception can be viewed here https://gist.github.com/urras/02bf85e19e57da7ccd8c/raw If you hereby agree to these changes, say so in this thread.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064.

Ansa89 commented 9 years ago

Ok.

lobiCode commented 9 years ago

Agreed.

2014-09-17 15:51 GMT+02:00 Urras notifications@github.com:

In order to publish Antidote https://github.com/dvor/Antidote in the Apple app store and Test Flight, Toxcore needs to make a GPL exception. However, we need permission to add an exception from the following people who have contributed to Toxcore:

The exception can be viewed here https://gist.github.com/urras/02bf85e19e57da7ccd8c/raw If you hereby agree to these changes, say so in this thread.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064.

Jman012 commented 9 years ago

I, Jman012, agree.

maksqwe commented 9 years ago

Agreed.

jin-eld commented 9 years ago

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 06:51:43AM -0700, Urras wrote:

• [x] @jin-eld

ok

mahkoh commented 9 years ago

Note that the "exception" was changed after it was posted. All of those who have already agreed to it might want to reread it. Furthermore you might want to post a version somewhere where nobody can edit it.

The Tox Foundation hereby grants you the rights described below

Does the "Tox Foundation" even have the right to do this? IIRC there is no CLA that grants the "Foundation" the right to sublicense code contributed under the GPL. This is the same agreement as the one used by Trolltech, but Trolltech does have a CLA that grants them the right to sublicense etc. Shouldn't this say

The copyright holders hereby grant ...

Not sure what the people who post "Ok" here are even agreeing to. Those who have contributed code under the GPL should consider very carefully if they want to give special rights to the "Foundation" that go against the spirit of open source. These kinds of agreements are only useful for commercial companies such as Trolltech and Canonical.

The following simple exception is more open than the one linked here.

You may link software (hereafter referred to as "Your Software")
against the Licensed Software and/or distribute binaries of Your
Software linked against the Licensed Software, provided that:
A) On demand, you make the source code of Your Software available
   under the terms of some open source license recognized by the OSI.
B) All distributions of Your Software prominently advertise condition
   A) of this exception.

This allows people to distribute clients to iPhone and co while still guaranteeing that the clients are open. The exception posted above which only allows "The Foundation" to look at all clients makes no sense if this is what you want to achieve.

the Toxcore License Agreement

Is there such a thing?

Carry on.

Martijnvdc commented 9 years ago

I am not on the list, indeed...

dubslow commented 9 years ago

@mahkoh why OSI instead of FSF? I believe there are some OSI licenses that don't allow modification?

mahkoh commented 9 years ago

@dubslow: Doesn't matter to me. However, the OSI website says:

  1. Derived Works The license must allow modifications and derived works, and must allow them to be distributed under the same terms as the license of the original software.

http://opensource.org/osd

ghost commented 9 years ago

Fine by me.

Paul Holden paulholden2@gmail.com

dubslow commented 9 years ago

@mahkoh hmm, ok.

At any rate, I am against the original version (for reasons mahkoh and kigu elucidate) and I am still unsure about even mahkoh's suggestion

nurupo commented 9 years ago

Does @dvor even agree to accept the exception?

tycho commented 9 years ago

Agree

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 6:51 AM, Urras notifications@github.com wrote:

In order to publish Antidote https://github.com/dvor/Antidote in the Apple app store and Test Flight, Toxcore needs to make a GPL exception. However, we need permission to add an exception from the following people who have contributed to Toxcore:

The exception can be viewed here https://gist.github.com/urras/02bf85e19e57da7ccd8c/raw If you hereby agree to these changes, say so in this thread.

— Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064.

urras commented 9 years ago

@dubslow Do you agree or not?

dubslow commented 9 years ago

At this point, no.

urras commented 9 years ago

@dubslow Mind if I ask why?

dubslow commented 9 years ago

1) mahkoh describes a number of issues with the given text, and 2) If Apple doesn't like the GPL, that's their problem, not ours. Tox is GPL for a reason.

Having said that, if it becomes clear that I'm in the small minority, then I will agree.

arcrose commented 9 years ago

Seeing that changes have been made since I conditionally agreed, I have decided to revoke my agreement until I have time to investigate further.

kyconny commented 9 years ago

Given the points raised above, I am withdrawing my support.

tux3 commented 9 years ago

I'd rather not agree to this right now since the OP keeps changing, I'm not sure what my agreement will mean in 5 minutes. Additionally the repo owner and the various authors can edit posts silently at any time, so I wouldn't trust what is posted in a GitHub thread at all.

I personally wouldn't mind "making an exception" to get some Tox apps into the Apple store, but I can't agree to this, especially after reading some of the points raised above.

ghost commented 9 years ago

Additionally the repo owner and the various authors can edit posts silently at any time, so I wouldn't trust what is posted in a GitHub thread at all

Hmm, I also withdraw my agreement.

urras commented 9 years ago

@kigu I changed it once. The only change I made was "the Tox Project" to "the Tox foundation".

TheLastProject commented 9 years ago

Maybe this should be closed until @urras comes up with a better way to do this so that we only allow Antidote for publishing in the Apple app store but require the equivalent source code of it to be available at any time on Github/whatever under the GPL, so that normal iOS users can use it but those with jailbroken devices can always run a modified version. We all benefit from more Tox users.

urras commented 9 years ago

Thank you all so much for providing your input and expressing your concern. I think it would probably be a good idea to revise the draft and find a better way to agree on this. Until then, I'll close the issue.

dvor commented 9 years ago

Does @dvor even agree to accept the exception?

Yes, I did.

urras commented 9 years ago

So, anyone have any better ideas to how we can draft and agree upon an exception?

dubslow commented 9 years ago

There are several issues here:

1) Whether or not, conceptually speaking, we want to grant GPL exceptions for the purpose of getting into the App(le) Store; my personal feeling is no, but the majority feeling seems to be yes (with some vocal no's)

2) Some people, myself included, would like to see any such exception granted solely to Antidote: any further projects' use of the exception must also be seperately approved;

3) The text of the exception itself has some issues that mahkoh raised, and I agree with his analysis that since the Tox Foundation doesn't hold the copyrights, the wording needs to be revised; (if the TF did hold the copyrights, then it wouldn't need our approval for any exception)

4) We need a verifiable and not silently editable place to work on issue 3. One possible suggestion is a new file in libtoxcore containing exception text; any and all who agree could create a commit adding their own name and GPG key to the file as agreement; such commits should be signed by said key. Any edits to the exception text itself should be accompanied by expunging the current list of signatures.

mahkoh commented 9 years ago

2) Some people, myself included, would like to see any such exception granted solely to Antidote: any further projects' use of the exception must also be individually approved;

If they have to be approved by "The Foundation" then that would be even worse than the current version. Such a rule would make forking toxcore impossible because only the original, "foundation-approved" version can ever go to the "AppStore". Having every contributor agree every time also seems to be impossible.

dubslow commented 9 years ago

Though you make good points, I would prefer to see minimal use of the exception: allow its use only where it's truly needed, not just by any old hack who wants to get around the GPL for some reason or another. Like all the issues, it's up for debate. Obviously getting all the contributors to agree to another exception would be difficult, but that's the point.

alpha-ninja commented 9 years ago

or we could just go lgpl

dubslow commented 9 years ago

And who approve them? The 'Tox Foundation'? How can we trust them never to corrupt themselves? I'm against giving automatic rights for the foundation to do as they please.

That's not quite what I meant, and I edited it to read separately as opposed to individually. Obviously it would need to be all contributors, not the Foundation (seeing as the latter has no rights currently).

zetok commented 9 years ago

So, anyone have any better ideas to how we can draft and agree upon an exception?

we As @davexunit suggested, there should be someone who is really oriented in how law works to write proper exception.

Aside from that, IMHO exception should be:

That being said, exception would apply only to toxcore version at given point in time.

iShift commented 9 years ago

Why so hard?

  1. Create commit with agreement and with all usernames
  2. All developers who agreed - make own comit to that file

=> all thing would be written in GitHub commits history

dubslow commented 9 years ago

@iShift that's what I proposed, preferably the commits should be signed as well

mahkoh commented 9 years ago

requirement for source and modified source to be provided for Tox Foundation on demand without any restriction imposed by license used by app (if possible)

Why not make it open source for everyone? Why does the "Foundation" need special rights?

↑ and requirement for source to be able to be included (re-licensed) without problems under GPLv3

Why? clients and core are orthogonal. Relicensing a client under an incompatible license will only cause fragmentation and not improve the core.

Jman012 commented 9 years ago

even though he isn't even a contributor of tox

@stqism has contributed to Tox and Toxic.

dubslow commented 9 years ago

Food for thought https://gist.github.com/dubslow/158d6e28cf379bf6be1a

mahkoh commented 9 years ago

If any contributors become unavailable, then any scheme that requires every contributor to approve every addition to such a list becomes impossible.

A scheme where all contributors grant everyone the permanent right to link against unmodified versions of the library as long as their program is open source does not have this problem.

zetok commented 9 years ago

Why not make it open source for everyone? Why does the "Foundation" need special rights?

toxcore is Free/Libre Software. Since rotting apple doesn't like Free/Libre Software, the only way around this is to make sure that at least 1 entity will get proper source, which can be further shared by it and re-licensed under GPLv3.

You have a point though.

It should require receiving entity have a special clause: Tox Foundation should have a point in its statute saying that received code from "exception clause" will be re-licensed under GPLv3 and released shortly after receiving. This would ensure that code will stay open. In an event of removal of given point from statute of Tox Foundation, Tox Foundation will transfer right to receive code in form, about which I wrote above, to other entity which would have requirement removed from statute of Tox Foundation.

Though lawyer should be contacted about that ↑

Why? clients and core are orthogonal. Relicensing a client under an incompatible license will only cause fragmentation and not improve the core.

From where comes assumption that there are no entities that would benefit from core not getting improvements? Not everyone would benefit from core being improved, thus there is a need for things being licensed under license that ensure code being libre.

@dubslow Nice, although it doesn't address abuse.

Also, would it really be possible to get app into store with such simple exception? (even if added stuff regarding issues I wrote about)

jin-eld commented 9 years ago

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 10:20:21AM -0700, nfkd wrote:

What does @irungentoo has to say about this? I won't trust the foundation unless he owns it.

+1

im-grey commented 9 years ago

+1 to @nfkd.

n 2014-09-17 13:13, nfkd wrote:

I don't trust the "Tox Foundation" Last time I heard it was owned by a non-programmer who only hosts the website. If it were under @irungentoo [1] control, it'd be much better. (I still wouldn't trust it with special rights, but it'd be a move on the right direction).

I think it should stay GPLv3+. Fuck Apple.

Don't give away our freedoms for it.

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub [2].

Links:

[1] https://github.com/irungentoo [2] https://github.com/irungentoo/toxcore/issues/1064#issuecomment-55927331

jin-eld commented 9 years ago

On Wed, Sep 17, 2014 at 09:45:44AM -0700, mannol wrote:

Additionally the repo owner and the various authors can edit posts silently
at any time, so I wouldn't trust what is posted in a GitHub thread at all

Hmm, I also withdraw my agreement.

Me too, it got too chaotic; withdrawing my agreement.

I do acknowledge the need for Tox to be present on all devices (I don't like Apple and their policy, but Tox needs to work everywhere to become a Skype killer), but this "exception" process needs to be clarified.

stqism commented 9 years ago

@jin-eld

@irungentoo is the Foundations President and CEO, even our founding documents proclaim this. Of course exact ownership has yet to be established on paper in bylaws, but current filed documents grant him ownership shared equally with people like @Proplex until they can be established.

At the end of the day he'd be required to sign off on bylaws granting ownership with that time comes as well, so please stop your fear mongering. I know you hate me neeh, but that doesn't give you an excuse to lie.

urras commented 9 years ago

What I'm thinking about doing is to create a git repo, and based upon what @dubslow said, revise and edit from there.