[sword-devel] GPL and other license related questions

[DM Smith]

On Jan 26, 2008, at 3:12 AM, Chris Little wrote:

>
> On Jan 25, 2008, at 8:52 PM, Jason Galyon wrote:
>
>> On that subject
>>
>> Free as in Freedom
>>
>> Is Sword available under a dual license btw?  This probably has
>> already
>> been answered but I am failing to find it currently.
>
> Sword and all works based on it, including all frontends, are licensed
> under the GPL v. 2 only and no other license or version of the GPL.
>
>>
>> Some believe the GPL to be restrictive and freedom destroying.  What
>> about other open source licenses like the Python license for example?
>> IANAL, but before I start a project I want to make sure I have the
>> freedom to develop open source as I believe is the most beneficial to
>> all.  Has this been answered before?
>
> The only people who would consider the GPL "freedom destroying" are
> people who only care about their own freedoms and not those of others
> (i.e. selfish people). I don't think we care about their interests. We
> certainly don't have any interest in having our work exploited by the
> selfish, who would like to exploit our years of work for their own
> personal, possibly monetary, gain.

The other "freedom destroying" position is that GPL is incompatible  
with some other licenses. At the GNU website, they maintain a lists of  
licenses that are compatible or incompatible with V2 and also V3.  
(These lists are different.) The upshot is that it may not be possible  
to use Sword with any other third party code that is open source. It  
may be that the licenses for Plone, Zope, Python, .Net,, C#, and other  
contexts in which users want to use Sword, are not conducive to such  
development. (I haven't looked)

I don't think we should change from the GPL, but I think we should  
allow for having Sword on as many devices as possible.

Working together to spread His word, openly and freely,
	DM Smith