Github ToS and Open Source

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Fri, 3 Mar 2017 17:58:21 +0100, Ralf Mardorf wrote:
>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.

http://lists.linuxaudio.org/pipermail/linux-audio-dev/2013-September/034140.html