Re: [Savannah-hackers] CVS and multilicensing for metaprojects on Savannah?

[Jaime E. Villate]

Hi,
It seems that your message has not been answered yet, so I will give you an
answer.

On Sun, Nov 10, 2002 at 10:27:39PM -0500, Joshua Judson Rosen wrote:
> The project is really more of a metaproject--there are several
> libraries and several applications, though they're all closely
> related; it's anticipated that code will move around between some of the
> applications and libraries as we get an overall correct structure
> worked out, so we currently have everything in the same CVS-repository
> with the various subprojects divided with subdirectories, so the first
> question is whether this is acceptable on Savannah.

Our policy is to ask metaprojects to break down into separate projects and
register them independently. We do not accept metaprojects because with our
limited human resources we are not prepared to handle them. For instance it is
much more difficult to track down legal licensing issues for a metaproject
than for several separate smaller projects. With subprojects registered
separately, it is also easier to control access permisions.

> there is, however, the possibility that we will decide
> that, for whatever reason, some of the libraries and/or programs
> should be distributed under a different license (say, the new BSD
> license to greater promote public uptake, or the GPL to keep the
> technology to the free-software community). I haven't been able to
> find any details about licensing-choices on the Savannah web-site, so
> I need to ask: would it be possible to specify a multitude of licenses
> for different subprojects in the same Savannah-project?

The license choices in Savannah should be obvious. There are several pointers
to them. In short, we accept only GPL-compatible licenses. One of the reasons
for that requirement is precisely to be able to have multiple licenses without
conflicts. If you use several GPL compatible licenses for different modules of
your project, your project's license is the one that is the less permissive
among them. For instance if module A has the new BSD license, module B has the
GPL license and module C the LGPL license. The project's license is GPL
(another reason why you might want to break your project into subprojects)

Cheers,
Jaime