banking-addons-team team mailing list archive

[Raphael Valyi <rvalyi@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Fri, Nov 2, 2012 at 6:57 PM, Stefan Rijnhart <stefan@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

>  On 11/02/2012 12:59 PM, Joël Grand-Guillaume wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>
> Another issue is the license of the Banking Addons, which is GPL. We need
> permission from the original author Pieter Kersten to relicense as AGPL in
> order to allow a merge with the Bank Statement addons.
>

 Hello Stefan,

Unless I'm mistaken, one is always free to take some GPL code and mix it
with a compatible but more restrictive license, such as the AGPL. This is
the same reasoning as you can include BSD or MIT code in your GPL software
provided you distribute the whole under the most restrictive compatible
license which would be GPL. In your case, the combined work
is contaminated by the AGPL additional restrictions (give the source even
for SaaS usage) and should be distributed under the AGPL.

Notice that this is the reason why there have been no legal issue when
OpenERP moved from GPL to AGPL license during 2009. People who didn't like
that move were always free to maintain their own fork under the original
GPL license, to a certain extent this is largely what happened with the
Tryton fork that stayed under GPL. Meanwhile, the AGPL branch doesn't
prostitute the original GPL code as it just adds further restrictions, that
many see as a protection against the possible apparition of a private SaaS
competition threat.

On the contrary, during 2011, the attempt to introduce the private use
OpenERP license thing which was more or less the reverse move (you pay to
get a license with LESS restrictions than the strict AGPL) was highly
criticized by OpenERP contributors and largely degraded the relations
between OpenERP SA and its contributing community (I think some newcomers
still didn't make that analysis this is why I remind it).

So I think there is no problem with that GPL to AGPL move (except that of
course it's likely to be a one way trip) and there is no permission to ask
to anybody in this case while of course it's still cool to inform the
original author about that combined work.


Sounds like boring considerations, but one should be aware that there are
very high financial interests looking over OpenERP and ready to exploit any
licensing flaw to steal that community work and be able to sell in a locked
in and monopolistic fashion. Creating great open source code is useless if
the free factor ends up stolen or sold.

That being said, kudo for the work of you both. On my side, I'm extracting
the extra-addons financial addons in a separate branch more manageable
branch too. I hope more synergies will come up from those code layout
re-organizations as we really need to move OpenERP forward regarding
financial management.


Regards.

-- 
Raphaël Valyi
Founder and consultant
http://twitter.com/rvalyi <http://twitter.com/#!/rvalyi>
+55 21 2516 2954
www.akretion.com