[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

[John Luke]

On Tue, 13 Jul 2004 15:44:30 -0400, Todd Berman <tberman@off.net> wrote:
> Hello,
> 
>         Until now, the licensing situation for MonoDevelop has been a bit up in
> the air. All of the code that originated from SharpDevelop is licensed
> under the GPL. However, the licensing the various existing contributors
> to MonoDevelop itself have been using is kind of up in the air.
> 
> I am going to be explicitly using the MIT X11 license on all new code
> that I write for MonoDevelop, and would like some input from various
> contributors/users about mandating the MIT X11 for new code inclusion.
> What I would like to see is everyone relicense all their code inside MD,
> both future contributions and past contributions, to MIT X11. However, I
> would like to get some discussion going about requiring/making this
> change.
> 
>

Oh boy.  I think there are a bunch of issues in this, which in the end
might not be worth messing with.

(Insert I am not a lawyer disclaimer.)

- Derivatives of the existing GPL code, cannot be re-licensed can it?
(editing a large part of the file will still leave it as GPL only) 
Arguably, this could apply to the whole thing, or just per-assembly,
or who knows for sure.  Does that meet your 'explicitly using the MIT
X11 license on all new code' requirement?
- Individuals copyrights on GPL code allows them to
re-license/dual-license what they wrote
- Having multiple licenses in a project just causes confusion in my opinion
- Anything submitted as MIT/X11 can just be put into MD as GPL, right?
- Subjecting ourselves to some sort of licensing conspiracy theory

Since I dont see anything preventing you from submitting everything as
X11, is it worth doing anything else?   I really don't like the idea
of some things being X11 and some GPL.

P.S. I am a fan of the MIT/X11 license, and not really a proponent of the GPL