Licensing / WordPress compatibility

[helen]

Howdy,

I'm currently investigating potential helper libraries for selections for WordPress (I am a committer and the current release lead for 4.0). Another regular contributor (@ericandrewlewis) submitted a pull request quite some time ago switching the licensing from Apache to dual-licensed GPL v2 and Apache. While technically this may be okay, ideally it would be GPL v2+ as opposed to v2 or possibly even just MIT, dropping the dual license entirely. I'm not sure if you have a specific reason for choosing Apache originally, so I'm curious as to thoughts on licensing here. I am by no means a software license expert, but I feel that this is an important thing to figure out.

Also, as a project committed to backwards compatibility, we take great care in third party library inclusion, and really strive to do work both upstream and downstream. We can open a separate thread for this if you'd like, but also curious as to your thoughts about playing together as open source projects.

Thanks!

[kevin-brown]

Hi @helenhousandi,

For the most part, I can't answer your questions about the licensing as that was done by @ivaynberg. Hopefully he can reply and clarify your questions. Though I do have one question: What is Wordpress 4 going to be licensed under?

Also, as a project committed to backwards compatibility, we take great care in third party library inclusion, and really strive to do work both upstream and downstream.

If you want to send a message to the mailing list about this, that would be preferred. For the most part, we try to separate the issue tracker and the mailing list as much as possible.

[helen]

Sounds good, I will take this to the mailing list since it's not yet an actionable item. :)

WordPress is GPLv2+ and will continue to be. We don't do semver, essentially for historical reasons - 4.0 is just as major as 3.9 and 4.1.

[kevin-brown]

Select2 4.0 is coming up, and this is the best time to get the ball rolling.

A few months ago this was moved to the mailing list, and I'd like to bring it back here for now, so we can keep it in one place. Similar to Bootstrap, I have started working on a Google Form to collect the responses. I have spoken previously with @ivaynberg, and we agreed that making the switch during the 4.0 release would be the best bet, though we do have the flexibility of postponing it to a later release.

To any past contributors reading this: If you are comfortable with the possibility of re-licensing your code under the MIT license, feel free to submit your response on the form.

[helen]

I don't know if this is just a coincidence, but we discussed this at the WordPress dev chat just a few minutes before you reopened this issue. MIT sounds great to us! We've also decided to wait it out for your 4.0, so probably doing this in our 4.2 cycle early next year. In the meantime, if you're interested, you can see what we're tinkering with here: https://github.com/helenhousandi/wp-19867-9864/tree/select2-19867

[kevin-brown]

I'm in the process of sending an email out to the Select2 contributors, starting with the translators, about the license switch.

The Google Form is here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PaAfNREMiYlVbQhgYiHYOPhjafcSZbpZBMfQqc3eDME/viewform
And the results are available here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1yMmp35TMjkyg3R7iFiNjufZ0wBqaFtf99V_7rBk4aUM/view

If anyone can assist us in spreading the word, that will greatly help us in making Select2 available to everyone.

[KingYes]

+1
Good job guys :)

[kevin-brown]

Here is the current breakdown of the responses for the translations. A little more than half of the translators have responded so far.

All responses (Yes): 16 languages
Some responses: 16 languages
No responses: 7 languages

We are currently waiting on responses from 32 of the translators.

[kevin-brown]

Select2 4.0.0-beta.2 is out and we're expecting a final release by the end of this month.

https://select2.github.io/

The switch to the MIT license is complete. I'm going to close off this ticket now that it's been finished.