8 ms·

JQuery dropping GPL from licence requires CLA , Big corporations hand?

25 points by mariuz 14y ago

mseepgood 14y ago
CLA... wow, this is bad and sad. :(
- batista 14y ago
  Actually it's very good news. It means that no single zealot or bad apple can stop the code from being used in ways the users want. E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free. And you still get GPL with their MIT licence: "The Foundation confirms that with the MIT licence, if someone desires GPL licensing, they are free to make changes and re-license it under the GPL."
  - tspiteri 14y ago
    I don't like how you brand Denis-Courmont a zealot or bad apple for not letting others break the license terms of his code. He licensed his code under the GPL for a reason, and if someone doesn't like his license, they shouldn't expect him to waive his rights on his code. (I don't know about the case, I'm basing this on your comment alone.)
    - ejames 14y ago
      Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech, but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating on your spouse is not a crime, but doing so still makes you a worse person. You have the right to keep all your money instead of giving a penny to charity, but being charitable is better. "Legal" and "good" are not the same thing. Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.
      - archangel_one 14y ago
        Calling him a zealot just for using the GPL seems a bit unnecessary to me, but whatever. It does not matter what his reasons are for it, he is allowing people to use the code he wrote under a certain set of conditions, which some people have not been honouring. I don't believe there is anything wrong with him calling them on that; why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?
        batista 14y ago
        >why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work? Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge conflict of interest?
        tspiteri 14y ago
        Maybe Apple and Microsoft should release all their software under a permissive license for the good of hundreds of millions of users. Is that what you are suggesting? I do not have any problem with people/corporations releasing/selling their code as they see fit, but I do take issue at people feeling entitled to set the terms for other people's code. If the other contributors do not mind the violation, they are free to remove his code and release their code as they see fit.
      - tspiteri 14y ago
        Using the GPL is not really comparable to saying something foolish or wrong, and is certainly not comparable to cheating on a spouse. Such arguments reek of anti-GPL zealotry.
    - batista 14y ago
      I don't happen to believe that what is legal is also moral.
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      The license terms were only broken in the most unimportant of ways. Apple did nothing to make VLC less free, did not have a custom version that needed source sharing, etc. It was a stupid technicality. Denis-Courmont did no-one good.
      - tspiteri 14y ago
        Honest question since I'm not really familiar with the case and might be completely mistaken: One of the fundamental principles behind the GPL is that a user can modify the program and run the modified program. Was this freedom preserved? Because if it was, my posts in this thread might be completely misguided.
        Dylan16807 14y ago
        That is going to depend on who you talk to. The GPLv3 has "anti-tivoization" text that keeps the device maker from locking down the device to approved programs. As far as the GPLv2 is concerned you only need to be able to modify and compile the code, and no particular device has to run it. In this particular case, anyone that was already capable of running code they compiled on an iphone (read: people with a developer license) was also capable of making and using modified versions of VLC.
  - thefreeman 14y ago
    apple can suck it
  - drone 14y ago
    Apple didn't violate "some GPL technicalities," they took away core rights from the user that the GPL license was designed to provide them. Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work? Besides, it was Apple that removed the software rather than modify the terms of their distribution to allow for GPL software.
    - batista 14y ago
      >Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work? 1) Because for a pragmatic (not zealot) guy, the license is just a practicality, not the be all end all. If the license gets in the way of the work getting used, so much worse for the license. 2) Because if we are 10 contributors to a program, have picked GPL, but have no problem with the app being available on the App Store, and some other contributors even do the hard porting work for free, then I could call the 1 of us who disagrees and destroys everything a zealot. 3) In the general case, because the use of GPL for a project could have just as well come from external factors and not because the contributors have some grant vision about GPL/FOSS software. E.g because a few underlying libs they had to use were GPL themselves. In that case, I'd absolutely despise some idiot taking advantage of that to force the hands of the other contributors/users.
  - Silhouette 14y ago
    E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free. Hang on a minute. What you're trying to push aside as a technicality has been a recurring sore point between Apple's App Store and the FOSS community, and Denis-Courmont is far from the only person who has been upset by attempts to distribute GPL'd software via the App Store under terms are incompatible with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL. [1] But in this case, since we're talking about an MIT licence, it's hard to see how the CLA makes any sense. What can it possibly allow anyone to do to anyone or with anything that they couldn't already do anyway under the MIT licence? They could release the code under a licence that doesn't even require the credit/copyright/disclaimer, I suppose, but those aren't exactly a heavy burden. Other that that, the whole point of licences like the MIT ones is basically to avoid having the kinds of restrictions that would ever result in copyright enforcement action, so it's not like you need a single party with standing to sue or issue takedown notices, for example. I don't see what anyone gains by having this extra hoop for contributors to jump though. [Edit: Someone posted the actual text of the CLA. It seems to address significantly more that just transferring rights to the jQuery Foundation, so there may or may not be sneaky legal shenanigans going on here that I wasn't considering above.] [1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...
    - Dylan16807 14y ago
      Apple is taking a Free program and distributing copies that have restrictions on them. But you can easily get the original Free version that has the exact same functionality, byte for byte. Seems like a technicality to me. The end user still has full access to the source code in its untainted GPL majesty.
- tspiteri 14y ago
  I too find the CLA decision a bit strange, though I have no issue with their dual to single license transition. Dual-licensing under MIT and GPL is effectively like licensing under MIT; if someone wants to write a proprietary fork, or a GPL extension, they already could and still can. What I find strange about the CLA is that I don't understand the reason behind it. With a solely-GPL project, I could understand an agreement like the FSF's, which has practical advantages such as a single party asserting the license terms if a third party breaks them, while promising the code will not be used in proprietary software against the author's wishes. But in this case, if the code is under the MIT license, third parties can already use the code in their proprietary code, so the agreement doesn't gain anything. So, what's the point?
- matsi 14y ago
  I'm a worried although the JQuery foundation is not a company. The CLA basically allows them to do everything with your code and you can't revoke it. One big bad example of CLA abuse to me is Sun's OpenSolaris CLA which allowed Oracle to take external contributions and turn Solaris back to proprietary software.
simias 14y ago
I'm always a bit surprised that an open source project can change its licensing terms so easily. Can't any contributor to the project with their code upstream oppose this change? How does that work?
- mseepgood 14y ago
  It will even become impossible to oppose as a contributor with a CLA installed.
- pm215 14y ago
  If your project insists on copyright assignment (as the FSF does) then there's a single copyright owner and the project can make any licensing change it likes. Otherwise (assuming you don't manage to get explicit agreement from all previous contributors for their past changes) the only licensing term changes you can make are those which the previous license already permitted. For instance, many projects use a "GPL v2 or any later option" wording, which would allow them to later move to GPLv3 even though they had previously accepted contributions made when v3 didn't even exist. In this case it looks like jQuery was previously dual-license MIT-and-GPL, so anybody who contributed to it was saying "you can use these changes under either MIT or GPL". That means it's entirely OK for the project to switch to "just MIT", because "MIT" was an option all those contributors were permitting already.
  - simias 14y ago
    Makes sense. Thanks.
Robby2012 14y ago
wow, this are really good news :)
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]
CGamesPlay 14y ago
What a sensationalist title. They dropped GPL, leaving MIT. This is a big win. MIT is significantly more free than GPL (it does not mandate that you make things derived from it free, but the license itself does provide more liberties than GPL). They require CLA, so that they can put the code under MIT. It's legal silliness, but how is it at all bad?
- wheaties 14y ago
  Sorry, meant to upvote you and hit the wrong one. There's no undo button.
- Dylan16807 14y ago
  How is it a big win? Dropping GPL is basically the same situation but slightly simpler. Also requiring the CLA to put the code under MIT makes zero sense to me. They could use the CLA to do a lawsuit, but why would they ever bother suing over MIT-licensed code?
  - novaleaf 14y ago
    about CLA: please see my reply to jeltz
  - tzs 14y ago
    You are thinking of a copyright assignment requirement, such as the FSF uses. With assignment, you are turning the copyright over to the assignee. In effect, it is no longer your work. The FSF's agreement includes a provision that they will give you a license to use the work in any way if you ask. JQuery is adding a copyright license requirement, not a copyright assignment requirement. You do not transfer your copyright to them. All you do is give them a license. The FSF needs an assignment because, as you implied, they foresee the need to sue to enforce the GPL. By owning the entire copyright, they avoid some troublesome issues of standing to sue. The JQuery people, as you note, are unlikely to ever need to sue to enforce the MIT license. Hence, they do not need to require copyright assignment. The JQuery contributor license does a few things useful to the JQuery project. Others have mentioned some of them already, so I'll just add one that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: It specifies that JQuery gets an irrevocable license to use the code. There's a popular belief that once someone releases something under an open source license, they cannot revoke that license. As far as I can tell, there is little or no legal support for that belief.
novaleaf 14y ago
a lot of people don't understand the reason for the CLA: it's because contributor work is under it's own copyright, per individual. This is a huge legal (bureaucratic) issue and thus the CLA is meant to normalize all contributions to fall under the MIT disclaimer: I'm not related with jQuery, this is based on my prior knowledge of open source contribution legal issues.
- novaleaf 14y ago
  and, I may add, something a lot of startups should consider more significantly before "opening up" their code bases. Tracking down contributions after-the-fact just to bring your codebase into compliance is going to be almost impossible, and this may be a requirement for your prospective exit's legal team.
- jeltz 14y ago
  Do you have an example of where this has been a problem? Most open source projects lack a CLA and do not have problems with bureaucracy. For example the PostgreSQL and Linux projects lack any CLA and have never had any problems with this as far as I know. Lacking a CLA means one less hurdle for new developers. The advantage of a CLA is that you can change license, but if you are MIT licensed you can already change to almost any license without requiring any approval from the community. CLA:s only make sense for very strict licenses.
dave1010uk 14y ago
Full text of the CLA: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZehcMYyX http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZehcMYyX
andreasvc 14y ago
They say they drop the GPL to avoid confusion ... i.e., they're caving in to FUD about GPL.
- SoftwareMaven 14y ago
  My guess (with no inside knowledge): they are dropping GPL because many companies have a strict "no GPL" policy and, unfortunately, those companies don't understand the notion of duel licensing. Furthermore, that confusion only harms the JQuery project, as the philosophical a aspects of the GPL aren't driving their open source philosophy. So it's not exactly FUD about the GPL. Companies can have very legitimate reasons for wanting to stay away from it. I would call it a more general legal ignorance on the companies' parts with pragmatism on jquery's.
- justincormack 14y ago
  It is very unclear with Javascript what a derived work is and what linking means, unlike C. You could argue that your whole website would become GPL if you linked with jquery under GPL terms, including the text, logos etc, even though most people do not want to put documentation under GPL (because of the attribution terms).
dmethvin 14y ago
I hope the people upvoting this are doing it to encourage discussion, not to agree with this totally inane post. There is no controversy. Dual licensing confused people for no good reason. Some people thought that including jQuery in their own projects would somehow apply the GPL on their project, since that was one of the licenses. The idea of choosing one license and not the other seemed odd, and most people are just users (not derivative work creators) so it doesn't even affect them. > Some users were surprised by the change Nobody has expressed surprise anywhere but the few people who posted here without reading the original post. The link to the bug tracker wasn't a user surprised by the change, it was someone simply reporting that we'd forgotten to remove the GPL from one of about two dozen pages where we had it mentoned. That's fixed now. > A search of the site shows that details of the actual agreements are not currently available. The only reason we didn't link the CLA or CAA is because it contains a form that the contributor submits and we don't want a bunch of crap posted back to us by people who aren't contributors. dave1010uk posted a link to the text below, and I've added a todo to make that text available on another page.

25 points by mariuz 14y ago

mseepgood 14y ago

CLA... wow, this is bad and sad. :(

batista 14y ago
Actually it's very good news. It means that no single zealot or bad apple can stop the code from being used in ways the users want. E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free. And you still get GPL with their MIT licence: "The Foundation confirms that with the MIT licence, if someone desires GPL licensing, they are free to make changes and re-license it under the GPL."
- tspiteri 14y ago
  I don't like how you brand Denis-Courmont a zealot or bad apple for not letting others break the license terms of his code. He licensed his code under the GPL for a reason, and if someone doesn't like his license, they shouldn't expect him to waive his rights on his code. (I don't know about the case, I'm basing this on your comment alone.)
  - ejames 14y ago
    Having the legal right to do a thing does not mean that you are invincible to criticism for exercising that right. You have the right to freedom of speech, but the things you actually say may be foolish or wrong; contrarily, cheating on your spouse is not a crime, but doing so still makes you a worse person. You have the right to keep all your money instead of giving a penny to charity, but being charitable is better. "Legal" and "good" are not the same thing. Denis-Courmont may have licensed his code under GPL for a reason, but it can very well be a bad, zealous reason. Indeed, I would expect that almost every person who truly is a zealot and a bad apple would choose to license their code under GPL. The GPL is a license that demands total obedience to a particular ideology of software distribution, and requiring that other people obey your ideology in every detail is the defining characteristic of a zealot.
    - archangel_one 14y ago
      Calling him a zealot just for using the GPL seems a bit unnecessary to me, but whatever. It does not matter what his reasons are for it, he is allowing people to use the code he wrote under a certain set of conditions, which some people have not been honouring. I don't believe there is anything wrong with him calling them on that; why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work?
      - batista 14y ago
        >why should he just sit there quietly while other people violate his license and profit off his work? Gee, I don't know. Maybe for the good of the hundreds of thousands of users of iOS/VLC? Maybe because the other contributors had agreed to this and didn't care for the technical violation, especially since both the code was available and the app was free? Maybe because also working for Nokia seems like a huge conflict of interest?
        tspiteri 14y ago
        Maybe Apple and Microsoft should release all their software under a permissive license for the good of hundreds of millions of users. Is that what you are suggesting? I do not have any problem with people/corporations releasing/selling their code as they see fit, but I do take issue at people feeling entitled to set the terms for other people's code. If the other contributors do not mind the violation, they are free to remove his code and release their code as they see fit.
    - tspiteri 14y ago
      Using the GPL is not really comparable to saying something foolish or wrong, and is certainly not comparable to cheating on a spouse. Such arguments reek of anti-GPL zealotry.
  - batista 14y ago
    I don't happen to believe that what is legal is also moral.
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    The license terms were only broken in the most unimportant of ways. Apple did nothing to make VLC less free, did not have a custom version that needed source sharing, etc. It was a stupid technicality. Denis-Courmont did no-one good.
    - tspiteri 14y ago
      Honest question since I'm not really familiar with the case and might be completely mistaken: One of the fundamental principles behind the GPL is that a user can modify the program and run the modified program. Was this freedom preserved? Because if it was, my posts in this thread might be completely misguided.
      - Dylan16807 14y ago
        That is going to depend on who you talk to. The GPLv3 has "anti-tivoization" text that keeps the device maker from locking down the device to approved programs. As far as the GPLv2 is concerned you only need to be able to modify and compile the code, and no particular device has to run it. In this particular case, anyone that was already capable of running code they compiled on an iphone (read: people with a developer license) was also capable of making and using modified versions of VLC.
- thefreeman 14y ago
  apple can suck it
- drone 14y ago
  Apple didn't violate "some GPL technicalities," they took away core rights from the user that the GPL license was designed to provide them. Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work? Besides, it was Apple that removed the software rather than modify the terms of their distribution to allow for GPL software.
  - batista 14y ago
    >Whether or not you agree with copyleft licenses, how can you sit there and say that someone is a zealot for wanting to enforce the terms under which they licensed their work? 1) Because for a pragmatic (not zealot) guy, the license is just a practicality, not the be all end all. If the license gets in the way of the work getting used, so much worse for the license. 2) Because if we are 10 contributors to a program, have picked GPL, but have no problem with the app being available on the App Store, and some other contributors even do the hard porting work for free, then I could call the 1 of us who disagrees and destroys everything a zealot. 3) In the general case, because the use of GPL for a project could have just as well come from external factors and not because the contributors have some grant vision about GPL/FOSS software. E.g because a few underlying libs they had to use were GPL themselves. In that case, I'd absolutely despise some idiot taking advantage of that to force the hands of the other contributors/users.
- Silhouette 14y ago
  E.g like this Rémi Denis-Courmont guy, a VLC contributor working for Nokia, killed the iOS VLC port for violating some GPL technicalities, despite the code being available, the users wanting it, and the team porting it to iOS for free. Hang on a minute. What you're trying to push aside as a technicality has been a recurring sore point between Apple's App Store and the FOSS community, and Denis-Courmont is far from the only person who has been upset by attempts to distribute GPL'd software via the App Store under terms are incompatible with both the letter and the spirit of the GPL. [1] But in this case, since we're talking about an MIT licence, it's hard to see how the CLA makes any sense. What can it possibly allow anyone to do to anyone or with anything that they couldn't already do anyway under the MIT licence? They could release the code under a licence that doesn't even require the credit/copyright/disclaimer, I suppose, but those aren't exactly a heavy burden. Other that that, the whole point of licences like the MIT ones is basically to avoid having the kinds of restrictions that would ever result in copyright enforcement action, so it's not like you need a single party with standing to sue or issue takedown notices, for example. I don't see what anyone gains by having this extra hoop for contributors to jump though. [Edit: Someone posted the actual text of the CLA. It seems to address significantly more that just transferring rights to the jQuery Foundation, so there may or may not be sneaky legal shenanigans going on here that I wasn't considering above.] [1] http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-gpl-enforcement http://www.fsf.org/blogs/licensing/more-about-the-app-store-...
  - Dylan16807 14y ago
    Apple is taking a Free program and distributing copies that have restrictions on them. But you can easily get the original Free version that has the exact same functionality, byte for byte. Seems like a technicality to me. The end user still has full access to the source code in its untainted GPL majesty.
tspiteri 14y ago
I too find the CLA decision a bit strange, though I have no issue with their dual to single license transition. Dual-licensing under MIT and GPL is effectively like licensing under MIT; if someone wants to write a proprietary fork, or a GPL extension, they already could and still can. What I find strange about the CLA is that I don't understand the reason behind it. With a solely-GPL project, I could understand an agreement like the FSF's, which has practical advantages such as a single party asserting the license terms if a third party breaks them, while promising the code will not be used in proprietary software against the author's wishes. But in this case, if the code is under the MIT license, third parties can already use the code in their proprietary code, so the agreement doesn't gain anything. So, what's the point?
matsi 14y ago
I'm a worried although the JQuery foundation is not a company. The CLA basically allows them to do everything with your code and you can't revoke it. One big bad example of CLA abuse to me is Sun's OpenSolaris CLA which allowed Oracle to take external contributions and turn Solaris back to proprietary software.

simias 14y ago

I'm always a bit surprised that an open source project can change its licensing terms so easily. Can't any contributor to the project with their code upstream oppose this change? How does that work?

mseepgood 14y ago
It will even become impossible to oppose as a contributor with a CLA installed.
pm215 14y ago
If your project insists on copyright assignment (as the FSF does) then there's a single copyright owner and the project can make any licensing change it likes. Otherwise (assuming you don't manage to get explicit agreement from all previous contributors for their past changes) the only licensing term changes you can make are those which the previous license already permitted. For instance, many projects use a "GPL v2 or any later option" wording, which would allow them to later move to GPLv3 even though they had previously accepted contributions made when v3 didn't even exist. In this case it looks like jQuery was previously dual-license MIT-and-GPL, so anybody who contributed to it was saying "you can use these changes under either MIT or GPL". That means it's entirely OK for the project to switch to "just MIT", because "MIT" was an option all those contributors were permitting already.
- simias 14y ago
  Makes sense. Thanks.

Robby2012 14y ago

wow, this are really good news :)

deleted 14y ago
[deleted]

CGamesPlay 14y ago

What a sensationalist title. They dropped GPL, leaving MIT. This is a big win. MIT is significantly more free than GPL (it does not mandate that you make things derived from it free, but the license itself does provide more liberties than GPL). They require CLA, so that they can put the code under MIT. It's legal silliness, but how is it at all bad?

wheaties 14y ago
Sorry, meant to upvote you and hit the wrong one. There's no undo button.
Dylan16807 14y ago
How is it a big win? Dropping GPL is basically the same situation but slightly simpler. Also requiring the CLA to put the code under MIT makes zero sense to me. They could use the CLA to do a lawsuit, but why would they ever bother suing over MIT-licensed code?
- novaleaf 14y ago
  about CLA: please see my reply to jeltz
- tzs 14y ago
  You are thinking of a copyright assignment requirement, such as the FSF uses. With assignment, you are turning the copyright over to the assignee. In effect, it is no longer your work. The FSF's agreement includes a provision that they will give you a license to use the work in any way if you ask. JQuery is adding a copyright license requirement, not a copyright assignment requirement. You do not transfer your copyright to them. All you do is give them a license. The FSF needs an assignment because, as you implied, they foresee the need to sue to enforce the GPL. By owning the entire copyright, they avoid some troublesome issues of standing to sue. The JQuery people, as you note, are unlikely to ever need to sue to enforce the MIT license. Hence, they do not need to require copyright assignment. The JQuery contributor license does a few things useful to the JQuery project. Others have mentioned some of them already, so I'll just add one that I don't think anyone else has mentioned: It specifies that JQuery gets an irrevocable license to use the code. There's a popular belief that once someone releases something under an open source license, they cannot revoke that license. As far as I can tell, there is little or no legal support for that belief.

novaleaf 14y ago

a lot of people don't understand the reason for the CLA: it's because contributor work is under it's own copyright, per individual. This is a huge legal (bureaucratic) issue and thus the CLA is meant to normalize all contributions to fall under the MIT disclaimer: I'm not related with jQuery, this is based on my prior knowledge of open source contribution legal issues.

novaleaf 14y ago
and, I may add, something a lot of startups should consider more significantly before "opening up" their code bases. Tracking down contributions after-the-fact just to bring your codebase into compliance is going to be almost impossible, and this may be a requirement for your prospective exit's legal team.
jeltz 14y ago
Do you have an example of where this has been a problem? Most open source projects lack a CLA and do not have problems with bureaucracy. For example the PostgreSQL and Linux projects lack any CLA and have never had any problems with this as far as I know. Lacking a CLA means one less hurdle for new developers. The advantage of a CLA is that you can change license, but if you are MIT licensed you can already change to almost any license without requiring any approval from the community. CLA:s only make sense for very strict licenses.

dave1010uk 14y ago

Full text of the CLA: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZehcMYyX http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZehcMYyX

andreasvc 14y ago

They say they drop the GPL to avoid confusion ... i.e., they're caving in to FUD about GPL.

SoftwareMaven 14y ago
My guess (with no inside knowledge): they are dropping GPL because many companies have a strict "no GPL" policy and, unfortunately, those companies don't understand the notion of duel licensing. Furthermore, that confusion only harms the JQuery project, as the philosophical a aspects of the GPL aren't driving their open source philosophy. So it's not exactly FUD about the GPL. Companies can have very legitimate reasons for wanting to stay away from it. I would call it a more general legal ignorance on the companies' parts with pragmatism on jquery's.
justincormack 14y ago
It is very unclear with Javascript what a derived work is and what linking means, unlike C. You could argue that your whole website would become GPL if you linked with jquery under GPL terms, including the text, logos etc, even though most people do not want to put documentation under GPL (because of the attribution terms).

dmethvin 14y ago

I hope the people upvoting this are doing it to encourage discussion, not to agree with this totally inane post. There is no controversy. Dual licensing confused people for no good reason. Some people thought that including jQuery in their own projects would somehow apply the GPL on their project, since that was one of the licenses. The idea of choosing one license and not the other seemed odd, and most people are just users (not derivative work creators) so it doesn't even affect them. > Some users were surprised by the change Nobody has expressed surprise anywhere but the few people who posted here without reading the original post. The link to the bug tracker wasn't a user surprised by the change, it was someone simply reporting that we'd forgotten to remove the GPL from one of about two dozen pages where we had it mentoned. That's fixed now. > A search of the site shows that details of the actual agreements are not currently available. The only reason we didn't link the CLA or CAA is because it contains a form that the contributor submits and we don't want a bunch of crap posted back to us by people who aren't contributors. dave1010uk posted a link to the text below, and I've added a todo to make that text available on another page.