[Discuss] licensing: who freakin cares?

[Robert Krawitz]

On Sun, 10 Apr 2016 16:09:37 -0400, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 4/10/2016 2:55 PM, Robert Krawitz wrote:
>> That's a project management/governance issue independent of choice of
>> license model.
>
> Imposing quality controls on contributions to a GPL-protected work adds
> restrictions to how recipients distribute modifications to that work.
> This is expressly prohibited by the GPL. Absurd as it sounds, the GPL's
> terms really do prevent RMS from imposing discipline on his volunteer
> coders because they themselves are recipients of free (as in FSF)
> software. So yes, the GCC governance issues actually do derive from the
> license.

What particular clause of the GPL forbids a distributor from doing QA
on what s/he distributes?

Licensing something under the GPL does not require *you*, the package
maintainer, to accept contributions.  It does mean that you can't
impose quality controls on what someone else downstream does, but
package maintainers -- and downstream distributors -- have every right
to impose quality controls on what they _themselves_ distribute.

>> But the Linux kernel is also GPL-licensed, and it doesn't suffer from
>> those problems.
>
> That's because Linus Torvalds rejects RMS's philosophy. He imposes
> discipline and quality controls on contributions to the kernel despite
> this being a technical violation of the GPL's terms.

Again, I'd like to know exactly what caluse of the GPL forbids you
from imposing discipline and quality control on your own process?
-- 
Robert Krawitz                                     <rlk at alum.mit.edu>

***  MIT Engineers   A Proud Tradition   http://mitathletics.com  ***
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