[Nagiosplug-devel] [Nagios-users] Licensing of Official and 3rd Party Plugins

[Holger Weiss]

* Hari Sekhon <hpsekhon at googlemail.com> [2008-01-03 09:47]:
> Are there any plans to upgrade the official plugin distribution to GPLv3?

This hasn't been discussed yet, so I can only speak for myself.

> Are there any advantages/disadvantages to doing so?

First, almost all of the official plugins explicitly state that they're
licensed under "either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version", so you can use and redistribute them with GPLv3 code
already.  Obviously, the "advantage" of switching to a GPLv3-only
license and therefore prohibiting redistribution under the GPLv2 would
be to force the additional restrictions imposed by the GPLv3, which I'm
personally not interested in.  It would also make using other people's
GPLv2-only code impossible.  On the other hand, as soon as we want to
include some GPLv3-only code, we'll have to upgrade to GPLv3-only, so
I'd _guess_ it'll happen some day anyway.

> Does anyone have any opinions in licensing of 3rd party plugins as GPLv3
> instead of GPLv2?

Personally, I'm somewhat annoyed by the various incompatible Open Source
licenses floating around, as it they can make re-using code impossible
in some cases.  As the GPLv3 is yet another license which is
incompatible to everything else, I'm not really a fan of it.  I would
prefer "GPLv2 or higher" licenses over "GPLv3-only", if possible.
However, that's just me.  People who are interested in the new GPLv3
restrictions will of course prefer "GPLv3-only" licenses.

Holger