Licensing proposal
Licensing
Perhaps the first order of business should be a discussion on how various components in this effort should be licensed.
My own view is that this layer sits immediately above the kernel, and its
services are accessible generally through IPC methods, primarily D-Bus. As
such, the designer of the layers that make use of these services should have
the freedom to utilize these services from anything from GPL to Proprietary
code.
The software components that provide these services, however, should IMHO be
licensed under the GPL where they export services through IPC mechanisms
and under the LGPL only in cases where they provide services that must be
linked with external programs (e.g. libraries).
I think this makes more sense than bsd, apache2, or similar licenses because
adoption of one of these may loose too much support from the FOSS side and
any license that does not permit distribution of proprietary code utilizing
these services would likely loose too much support from the proprietary side.
So I propose that:
- Kernel Space Modules (like drivers) be GPL2
- User Space Daemons exporting service via IPC be GPL2
- Libraries be LGPL2
- Wiki content and specifications be GNU FDL
Other thoughts? --Writchie 03:19, 27 November 2007 (CET)
I(Mudyc) agree with few minor points:
- The kernel space modules should follow the licensing terms of the kernel. With Linux it's GPL2 at the moment.
- It might be good motion to support GPL3 too with user space applications, i.e. GPL2+.
