Minutes of the SIPB Meeting of 2010-07-05 The meeting was called to order by jhamrick at 19:30:00. In attendance were Voting members: afarrell jhamrick pquimby cesium gdb zhangc lexrj dwilson kaduk price Associate members: jhawk Prospectives: wings broglek mats_a incematt jgross Guests: vinitlee Officer Report: =============== Project Report: =============== gdb: I've mostly completed work on the invirtibuilder which lets xvm to migrate to git. Will be done in about a week. jhamrick: The YouTube functionality in gutenbach is fixed so you just pipe the url to lp. You can also use my scripts, which make things more convenient. geofft: I'd like to bring up my licensing policy again I'd like to read it for completeness. I propose we adopt it. In a file at /mit/geofft/Public/sipb-licensing-recommendation.txt *geofft reads policy aloud* *price seconds* *gdb thirds* jhawk: I haven't done due diligence, so I shouldn't hold things up, but It's odd to recommend the GPLv2 or higher without an explanation. geofft: Why? jhawk: Someone might think the document was out of date, or think we didn't want them to use GPLv3. geofft: I point out that this is optional. Also, there is an explanation why in the proposed text to be posted to the wiki. jhawk: Anyone who has a good understanding and will vote in favour? price: Yea, me and I think many more. The original objection was to the explanatory text going in the policy. People wanted it in the wiki where it was more easily modified. Why geofft's proposal is a good idea? 1) People start new projects all the time. A couple people do things, hack on it, and submit patches. A while down the road, the maintainer looks back and thinks, "I made this software, and made it available. I should probably license this..." This means they have to go through the hassle of finding all of the of people who have contributed and getting their consent. So, it is better to license early. 2) Many people don't like to think about licenses. It makes sense to write down a recommendation that aggregates what people would say when they ask around the office and zephyr. It names one permissive and one copyleft license. So, more people when starting will know this exists and take the specific steps to make this easy from the start. mats_a: I like the idea, but if the goal is to foster new projects, there might be disparity between this and the goal of creating something so that people who have an idea can just start hacking on it. We might want a "how to start a project" template. price: That doesn't seem workable. People start projects different ways. Also, that is more complex. mats_a: In whatever way people should start projects, you want to provide a link to this. geofft: The proposed text is intended for this link. kaduk: I kinda feel like mats proposal is orthogonal. jhawk: Greg, I like your explanation. I myself always give a license immediately but apparently people don't always do that. But why we would recommend letting the licensee use a later version? That's in the GPL. geofft: No. The Licensor has to specifically allow that. Linux is specifically in GPLv2. Derivative works cannot be in GPLv3. jhawk: Gosh, I guess this is confusing. pquimby: Check me here: The intent is to establish a recommendation, not a legal default. So, if someone fails to license, then this isn't misinterpreted as "oh someone didn't license, I guess it's automatically GPLv2." price: Yea, that's not how copyright works. geofft: Look at the documentation recommendation. mats_a: Is this still up to date with the link sent on zephyr? motion passes 14-0 kaduk: I fixed a bug in which the openafs Was failing on a kernel module. There was random memory corruption. Office Report: ============== Other: ====== Other Other: ============ meeting adjourned at 19:44. Minutes taken and submitted by afarrell.