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

[Hari Sekhon]

Holger Weiss wrote:
> * 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
>   
Thanks for the response, I think your points are valid. I'll continue to 
use a GPL version 2 or higher license in order to try to maintain 
compatibility
and then I'll go GPLv3 when more people get in to it.


Hari

-- 
Hari Sekhon