Aseprite drops the GPLv2 for its proprietary EULA
Hi Tobias, hi *,
You might have heard of it already, but Aseprite's main developer and
sole copyright holder (thanks to his CLA) relicensed Aseprite from
GPLv2 to proprietary (custom EULA with strong freedom restrictions)
[0].
This has no direct impact on the Debian packaging as the currently
packaged version obviously stays open source. Still, there are a few
points I thought worth of mentioning here:
* Open source fork: When we heard about this yesterday, we decided
with some contributors from the Godot Engine community to create a
fork of the repo as of the last GPLv2 commit [1].
I don't have a precise plan yet for this repo, but wanted to secure
the code and give interested users a place to discuss a potential open
source community version of Aseprite. See (and partake in) the
discussion [2]. Forks should not be done lightly, and if we manage to
convince the original author to go back to the GPLv2, I'll gladly
remove this fork.
* Reasons for the license change: It's not fully clear yet why the
Aseprite developer decided to drop the GPLv2, but based on this
Twitter discussion we had [3] he seems to be pretty unhappy (not to
use stronger qualificatives) about distro packaging, in particular
Debian's.
Those are pretty bad reasons IMO, and it shows that he has a biased
understanding of the free software ecosystem as a whole, but that's
still something you might want to be aware of.
There are also ongoing discussions about the change on the commit's
comment GH frontend [4].
Regards,
Rémi / Akien
[0] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/commit/5ecc356a41c8e29977f8608d8826489d24f5fa6c
[1] https://github.com/aseprite-gpl/aseprite
[2] https://github.com/aseprite-gpl/aseprite/issues/1
[3] https://twitter.com/davidcapello/status/769201407752798208
[4] https://github.com/aseprite/aseprite/commit/5ecc356a41c8e29977f8608d8826489d24f5fa6c#commitcomment-18851029
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