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

[edgar . soldin]

Quim Gil wrote:
> 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.
>   

What is the legal reason? I can't see the conflict of LGPL and GPL3. 
Only deriving from duplicity would be problematic, but I can't see how 
you are going to do this.

> 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.  :)
>   

may real nokia lawyer please speak up :)

> 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.
>   

Well. Using open source does not free a company from extensive testing 
and through that giving it's customers the most stable product. Any 
bugfixes and enhancements of are delivered back to the project for the 
benefit of all. Thanks to GPL.

> > 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.
>   

If it is so nokia should use and contribute to GPL'd code ..

kind regards ede