Github ToS and Open Source

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 03 Mar 2017 11:20:55 -0500, Paul Smith wrote:
>That's potentially very bad, because the GHL actually can be argued to
>work around the copyleft nature of the GPL (e.g., if you obtain the
>code under the auspices of the GHL not the GPL, you may not need to
>follow the requirements that you publish the source for binaries that
>you distribute).

This indeed would offend the GPL. resp. the GPL would make the GHL null
and void. However, actually the linuxsampler folks added an addition to
the GPL, which is the reason that some major distros excluded
linuxsampler from official repositories. IOW they don't care that the
addition is null and void, they accept it, but as a result exclude it
from the repositories. One of those major distros is Ubuntu.

Ubuntu provides http://packages.ubuntu.com/yakkety/qsampler a frontend
for linuxsampler, that is completely useless without linuxsampler. They
made the most essential hard dependency a suggested dependency.

I hate this license bullshit and all the discussions about it. Most
likely nothing changed, but it's just another new idea to add fresh
fuel to a quarrel, to spread FUD, just for some idiotic marketing
purpose.

Yes, there were some GPL'ed disputes were an author ask the community
to set people under pressur who legally forked projects, so that the
forks were discontinued, e.g. people who improved
http://packages.ubuntu.com/zesty/aeolus without offending the
license,it were completely free open source forks without
any bad intentions. Theoretically an addition could help those
people, while OTOH an addition isn't needed, since the GPL already
allows to fork GPL'ed code under the terms of the GPL. A soap opera
that happened for GPL'ed code would also happen, if the code would get
additional freedom by another license. An additional license would make
it more hard to decide if the license is or isn't null and void.