The Mercurial license is GPLv2

[Matt Mackall]

On Tue, 2008-08-05 at 21:20 +0200, Paul R wrote:
> On Tue, 5 Aug 2008 19:20:32 +0200, "Dennis Brakhane" <brakhane at googlemail.com> said:
> 
> Dennis> Just out of curiosity, what part of GPLv3 do you dislike?
> Yes. This might sound slightly off-topic, but Matt seems to have
> a long reflexion on free software licences, from which I'd like to
> learn as well. Matt, did you stated and explained your position in
> a page or an email I can find in the archive ? If not, I'm sure it
> would be worth the effort, thanks.

Recall that the Mercurial license was chosen when the GPLv3 was just a
rumor. The FSF's most recent attempt at a license (the GFDL) was such a
disaster that Debian was forced to dump everything using to continue
complying with their free software guidelines (aka "the open source
definition"). And the FSF didn't seem to be the least bit bothered by
that. Trusting the FSF to get it right with GPLv3 didn't exactly seem
prudent at the time.

Not long after, we got to see the drafts, and they had numerous issues.
As part of the Linux Foundation's Technical Advisory Board, I was in on
conference calls with the FSF about the direction of GPLv3 and I found
them (not surprisingly) to be unresponsive and unsympathetic to our
concerns. Here's an article with some of the bigger issues:

http://lwn.net/Articles/200422/

While most of those issues don't particularly matter to Mercurial
itself, they do matter to the larger community. So I'm not particularly
pleased with GPLv3.

In the big picture, it's much like an upgrade from XP to Vista. Sure
it's shiny and new, but it's got a bunch of new "features" of
questionable value, it's got weird DRM issues, it's more complicated,
it's incompatible, and it's untested. It's not at all obvious that
upgrading is a good idea even if Microsoft^WFSF is doing its damnedest
to take the old version off the market.

-- 
Mathematics is the supreme nostalgia of our time.