Re: The company that wants to contribute (was Re: [Duplicity-talk] Version 0.5.07 Released)

[Quim Gil]

Hi there,

Yes, at the moment we cannot take any component to our platform licensed
as GPLv3 only, and therefor we couldn't choose Duplicity. "GPL2 or
later" is absolutely fine.

ext Michael Terry wrote:
> I also appreciate the information.  Though you weren't terribly
> clearer about exactly why your lawyers have reservations

Lawyers in general are reluctant about written statements. Double
reluctant if their speak on behalf of a big corporation. And I'm not a
lawyer, so imagine how reluctant I am about writing on legal stuff with
my nokia.com address.  :)


> I assume they are just being conservative, pending more case law.

That is a useful assumption. Corporate lawyers were reluctant few years
ago about GPL and free software licenses in general and here you have
now a whole Maemo platform having LGPL 2.1 as default preferred license
(and a whole Qt stack being relicensed to add LGPL as well).

You need to think that Nokia ships software preinstalled in sold
devices. Anything wrong in that software might cause very expensive
liabilities, and this is why some conservatism might even make some sense.


> I believe Nokia is acting in good faith and doesn't intend to legally
> abuse the codebase.

You can ask about Nokia's behavior in other community projects around
GNOME, freedesktop.org, WebKit, Mozilla, Xorg, Linux Kernel... and now
KDE after the Trolltech acquisition. They tend to have good opinions for
what I can tell.

There was the S60 + the co-owned Symbian stacks, based on closed source
but even that is moving now to open source. Really, the last thing Nokia
wants is to abuse and get bad reputation in the open source community.

-- 
Quim Gil
open source advocate
Maemo Software @ Nokia