Minus one license, Plus one GPL

2008.10.30 by Matthias Kirschner in #fsfe #forum #GPL #kde #proliferation

Ok, it is already some days old, but I was not able to write about it earlier.

Our associated organisation KDE has launched a new forum on 12. October. Beside the result that more people who are not so familiar with the use of e-mail will find help about a Free Software desktop environment, there is one other interesting point: In collaboration with KDE, MyBB's developers released the software under the GPLv3.

"The KDE forum guys have come to us with the wish to use our forum software. In this process, we needed to clear out our licensing, also to make it easier for the KDE community to leverage MyBB. As a result of that, we release the MyBB forum now under the terms of the GPL. This was very well-received by the community around MyBB" (Chris Boulton, project manager, MyBB Group)

Thanks to the MyBB's developers and to the KDE guys for their work to get rid of a strange self-made license.

More information can be found in KDE's press release. There is also a nice article Make Your Open Source Software GPL-Compatible. Or Else. by David Wheeler. He argues that Free Software developers should use an existing widely-used license compatible with the GNU General Public License (GPL), particularly the GPL, LGPL, MIT/X, or BSD-new licenses. Also he argues against Free Software license proliferation.