Relicensing Dolphin: The long road to GPLv2+

> Guy who doesn't do anything about nvidia's blob, even though he could?

Well, other than flipping them off :)

That's a rather silly argument because it's his hardware...

I'm not saying he's pro, I'm saying for Linux it didn't matter, because be didn't have a choice. For got he didn't go with GPLv3 so no doubt he is against it.

AGPL is a market failure as I see it. I understand and sympathize with what that license is trying to do, but in practice, it just means that many companies won't touch that software (or will only touch it in a fashion where they don't modify that part of the system), meaning that there are far fewer adopters at all, and of those that adopt, fewer modify the software, meaning that it evolves more slowly than products with more used licenses.

Honestly, I'd sooner prefer to see everything licensed under BSD / MIT (Expat, X11) / ISC / etc. "copycenter" / "copyfree" licenses, for the simple reason that very few people in their right mind would use the AGPL at all (let alone in a project that doesn't involve writing network-facing software), and I'd rather see more software be compatible with as many free software licenses as possible. Aside from public domain, such non-copyleft licenses are a dream for writing free software, since the license doesn't get in the way of using such code in, say, Apache'd or GPL'd or MPL'd or whatever-L'd code.

(A)GPL, in other words, should be reserved for things that aren't meant to be reusable by other codebases. For everything that should be reusable, LGPL is about the limit for something being usable (and even that can be difficult to work with).

Yes, it is because those terms only apply to conveyances that occur as part of a transaction in which the right of possession of the User Product is transferred.

Note that the GPLv3 defines "User Product" as "either (1) a 'consumer product', which means any tangible personal property which is normally used for personal, family, or household purposes, or (2) anything designed or sold for incorporation into a dwelling".

The iPhone is the "User Product". This can further be seen by considering the definition of "Installation Information": “Installation Information” for a User Product means any methods, procedures, authorization keys, or other information required to install and execute modified versions of a covered work in that User Product from a modified version of its Corresponding Source.

In short, the User Product is the thing you install the covered work (the GPLv3'd thing) on and run it on, which for an App Store would be the iPhone or iPad. Unless GPLv3 is not using "possession" and/or "transaction" in their normal meanings, there is no way to characterize purchasing and downloading an app from the App Store as being a transaction in which the right of possession of the iPhone is transferred. Since no definitions of possession or transaction are given in the license, we can assume their normal meaning.

I haven't raised this issue with the FSF because I don't see it as an issue. They are the ones that specifically put in the limitation that Tivoization only occurs for GPLv3 object code conveyed as part of a transaction where the right of possession of the User Product is transferred to the person receiving the object code. In general, considering how much time they spent on drafting this thing, I generally assume it means what it says and it says what they intended.

If they somehow botched the drafting and that is not what they meant, it doesn't really matter anyway because if it ends up in court and the parties disagree on how they interpret those parts, the court will go with what it says, not what the drafter claims they meant. So, my general policy (with all licenses, not just GPL) is to go with what they say, unless they are too ambiguous and then I avoid the covered software. (Actually, before I get to that point I first see if I can limit my use of the work to only those uses that do not require the permission of the copyright holder. If I can limit me needs thusly then I can ignore the license).

That seems to contradict the clause that says no further obligations can be imposed upon authors or copyright holders. In particular, they cannot be forced to provide a warranty.

'relicensing' is also still under the original license as far as I understand it. Isn't it still bound by the clause not to make drastic changes?

> Can you add a trailing space to every single line of the code and release it on github as "GPLv2 and later" (hey, it's a patch), thus getting rid of the whole "GPLv2 only" clause?

No, a patch that doesn't completely replace existing code can not alter it's copyright. As long as you can insure that your GPLv2 code is in the project and not easily replaced, you control the project's license.

> But what if you objection to GPLv2+ is specifically already realized in GPLv3,like, say, the market-differentiated anti-Tivoization rules.

Yeah, if you like tivoisation, you probably don't like the spirit of the GPL at all. Tivoisation is really a loophole that wasn't anticipated in GPLv2. It should not have been allowed by GPLv2, but it simply wasn't anticipated.

> (Also, "similar in spirit" is so vague as to be completely meaningless.)

Vague is how the law is. It has to be vague, and the people who wrote the GPL have a good understanding of how judges interpret vague language. I trust them to have done a good job.

Then people can still use your code under GPLv2.