[TYPO3-english] Extensions potentially violating the GPL

Thu Dec 16 11:43:22 CET 2010

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Hey everybody.

Let me just say what my position was on the german list.

I am clearly willing to discuss it a little bit more, but because of
less time at the moment i will just write down what i allready said.

So, let me dream a little bit ...

I do not want to remove all extensions from TER that do not agree with
The GPL. No matter if it's an extension under another free licence or
an extension with a completely closed commercial license.
I would prefer to reorganize the TER to handle extensions with all kind
of licenses.

I think about the following:
* All code uploaded to TER has to be GPL or at least of another free
  License.
* Extensions should be able to declare external packages for download,
  such as the YAML extension allready does.
* Extensions should be able to declare, if they are licensed
  * completely free
  * free for non commercial use
  * completely non free
* When downloading an extensions through the extension manager or via
  the TER page on typo3.org, i want to filter for these categories
* An extension using the external package download feature should not
  be treated as a non free one by default. On the german list, the
  person implementing the piwik integration extension said, that he
  is using external package download because the piwik source is very
  large at one hand and has very short update cycles at the other.
* Maybe if an extension is completely non-free, the only thing being
  part of its TER representation should be the package download
  instruction.
* The license categories should be very clearly displayed on the TER
  webpage and inside the extension manager. I am very sure most of the
  users downloading one of the jw player extensions don't even read
  the manual (because the extensions often work out of the box without
  any configuration) and so don't realy know that they are doing wrong
  when they use it on commercial projects without payment.
* If someone wants to give away his extension but doesn't want to
  upload his code to TER (even if gpl licensed), he could use the
  package download feature as well.

One thing is: I don't want to support people that don't read the manual.
Everybody downloading an extension from TER should be self responsible
to read any kind of delivered documentation. But on the other hand, it
doesn't hurt us to color the TER web page blocks in an obviouse way.

The package download feature should take care of those kind of packges
that are not allowed to be downloaded directly from the remote server.
I am thinking about files being described as "please do not link this
file directly". To handle that, the backend administrator should be
able to upload the download package files through an file upload field
directly. Therefore, we should specify a "package file download target"
field as well as a "download the package file yourself" field.

The reason why i want to add those features to the TER: Sometimes i
don't realy know an extension to solve a certain problem but i know
how to describe the problem. Then i want to got ot he TER and look for
a fitting extension bevor starting to implement one for my own. If we
kick some extensions out of TER because of not agreeing the license
situation (no matter what kind of license situation that might be some
days in the future) i am not able to find them. But i don't want to
search 10 or more inofficial TERs just because that's the only way for
commercial extension providers to publish their work. Enforcing license
limitations in TER will in my opinion split the market. What this means
can be seen at Googles Android Market. Some app developers don't publish
their apps through the official market but on others. If i want to
download an android app, i better google for it instead of using the
official market download search form becaus that would not provide the
results i want to have. This situation is kind of painful and i would
realy like to preserve the TYPO3 TER from that.

If there are extensions that are completely closed (rethorical situation,
i realy thing there *are*) even if that's against our license policy and
against our all inmoust  persuasion, we should not ban them completely
from TER but only blame them a bit instead.

The situation i want to construct is:
"If you don't agree with our rules, you should not upload your code to
TER. But if you want, we could just name you and your download page
Within the TER search results".

I'm very convinced that this is not a thing of days but of weeks or
months. Especially because such a breaking change has to be discussed
a lot and implemented for all supported versions of TYPO3.

So my position is very clear: I would rather change the TER structure
in a very hard way than delete all kind of usefull extensions from TER
because of incompatibility with the TER rules.

So if we realy to anything, we should do it the user friendly way, not
the hardliner way.

I totally agree with Dimitry: Why not change the TER rules?
Even if i think that Dimitry doesn't want to go that wide.

[p.s.]
Hmm, took more time an wanted to spend ...
[/p.s.]

Greatings,

Stephan Schuler
Web-Entwickler

Telefon: +49 (911) 539909 - 0
E-Mail: Stephan.Schuler at netlogix.de
Internet: http://media.netlogix.de

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- -----Ursprüngliche Nachricht-----

Von: typo3-english-bounces at lists.typo3.org [mailto:typo3-english-bounces at lists.typo3.org] Im Auftrag von Tonix (Antonio Nati)
Gesendet: Donnerstag, 16. Dezember 2010 10:36
An: typo3-english at lists.typo3.org
Betreff: Re: [TYPO3-english] Extensions potentially violating the GPL

If you develop an important extension at your cost, and you have to
"live" with your work, or you keep all the work for you, or you just
publish a (complete or reduced) version in compiled state.
If extension is well documented and complies all TYPO3 programming
rules, why not including it in TER?

Tonino

Il 16/12/2010 10:26, Ivano Luberti ha scritto:
> Why you would do that?
>
> Il 16/12/2010 10.17, Tonix (Antonio Nati) ha scritto:
>> So, it is possible or not to upload extensions which contain
>> "compiled" (i..e. not source) code?
>>
>> Tonino
>>
>> Il 16/12/2010 10:09, Dmitry Dulepov ha scritto:
>>> Hi!
>>>
>>> Kay Strobach wrote:
>>>> based on the discussion which has been done on the german list about
>>>> non
>>>> GPL extensions there is new article in the wiki to collect those
>>>> extensions:
>>>>
>>>> http://wiki.typo3.org/Overview_Extension_manuals#Non-GPL_compatible_extensions_.28to_be_removed_from_TER.29
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Based on the terms of use for the TER these extensions could be removed
>>>> without further notice - but that's not what we want as a result, we
>>>> just want to keep the TER clean and found a solution to solve that
>>>> problem and protect all users of TYPO3 of licensing problems.
>>> May be it is better to change TER rules?
>>>
>>

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