First of all, it seems that you do not feel appropriately valued for the work you did. [...] I always said that the should somehow get into these repos for Ubuntu and other popular distros to get a big boost in attention. Therefore, your work was a decisive step into the right direction.
Actually, it's not something so straightforward, the question about how I feel comes from different aspects:
1) I somewhat have the impression that I was pissing off people by changing old workflows and what not, when creating a "make install" target and trying to get everything working properly for multi-user systems (personal settings vs system-wide data, etc). Despite the complaints and some people volunteering to fix things in a better way, I think that nobody made any serious improvement to my implementation, yet. But, at any rate, I did that after waiting for about ~1 year to see if anybody got the strength to do it, because I had told you that I would try to do it.
I was not waiting sitting with my arms crossed, and overtook Ogre package mantainance in Debian (and Ubuntu) to bring it up to date, and prodded CEGUI's maintainer to a point where he got a bit angry with me, with the main purpose of getting Sumwars into Debian/Ubuntu. And I got a very difficult year, involving defending thesis, holidays for 1 month in a country without internet, unemployed and new job in a new country, and some personal nasty problems; but that's another story.
2) AFAIK only me cared enough to warn you about serious licensing issues (like with the fonts). Are you familiar with the running story that Microsoft gets more revenue from Android phones than Windows phones? I don't know if that's actually true, but it's not beyond possibility that, if you wanted to sell Sumwars as iphone app and got enough popularity/money, they would be suing your ass and could have to pay them royalties for using the fonts, or libraries, or what not.
So it's not that I feel that everybody should bow at me when I join the room. But having people babbling non-sense about GPL being harmful for the project when they didn't even read the license, and are not doing anything at all to remove the more serious licensing issues of the remaining Commonwealth font (which I brought several times to attention, and still at this point nobody removed) nor did anything previously to remove other really harmful things, is not funny.
On the topic: Who threw BSD into the discussion ? I believe that I informed myself about this in the past and rejected it because of any grave disadvantages. But I have already forgot again what the problem was.
BSD or GPL?
http://www.matusiak.eu/numerodix/blog/index.php/2007/12/15/gpl-vs-bsd-a-matter-of-sustainability/ (read fully or not at all, you can get the wrong impression if only reading half of it)
Basically, it boils down to if you want to ensure that
everybody (including players) should have access to project that you develop
remains freely available forever (GPL); or if you want to give
developers who want to use your code the power to use it in any way that they please,
even if that involves creating a closed-source project from that, and never publish the code (BSD).
However, discussion about GPL V2 <-> V3 should be enough, right ? Apparently both have their issues as I see it. So what I want to ask is: Can we please make a sensible discussion about the risks instead of discussing about general ideals and philosophy and prejudices ?
It's difficult to discuss licensing without discussing ideals and philosophy. Because, if you are motivated enough to create a vast software project as you did, for sure you all did it for a reason, with a motivation, with a
general ideal, a
goal. And, ultimately, licenses are implementations (in law) of the ideals and goals that you have with your new baby-project.
So you should choose the
driving ideal, goal for the project first, and then choose the license that you think that suits that ideal/goal better.
Like, if you prefer that your game becomes freely available at all times in the future for everybody, to allow others to continue your effort when you are not interested (or create alternate games), but always having players enjoying your game freely. Or if you prefer to get to as many users as possible for your game as a whole or only parts, even if that means risking a company using your code and dialogs for a different game in the next XWii PS-Box console, without you getting a dime nor your users being able to exercise the rights that they had when using your code directly.
So the question is: What is the complete list of issues with GPLv+2 (it always seems that only two examples were named but the list might be longer)? How grave and realistic are these issues ?
Reasons to move to GPLv3:
http://gplv3.fsf.org/rms-why.html and
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/quick-guide-gplv3.htmlProbably not much that affects a project like Sumwars. "Tivoization" is not a problem for a project Sumwars. But it will allow companies to not have to pay for Sumwars to Microsoft (see Novell-Microsoft deal in the article). Or, if distributed on a DRM-enabled platform, with GPLv3 you would be giving your users the freedom to remove DRM restrictions (which is why they don't).
So it depends on your opinion of the matters, I consider this a feature. I don't want to allow any company to take profit from my project to turn it against my users and take rights away from them. If they are not going to maintain the rights that I want for my users, I rather not having the company dealing with my project at all.
Apart from that, some company could sue Sumwars as developers, for infringing their patents, even if they distribute it, which is quite crazy.
To remove all of this non-sense, and
try to fight agains software patents, GPLv3 was created.
Also, a project with GPLv3 is compatible with Apache 2.0-licensed stuff, which at the moment you're not using it, AFAIK. But apparently, GPLv2 and Apache 2.0 are incompatible.
So, as a summary, there's no reason practical reason to downgrade your license to GPLv2, other than if you want to allow some of the described practices trying to sneak around the protections that you give to the users of the software.
Is there really a realistic chance to get the program running on one of these Apple products (Ipad...)? I somehow doubt it considering our demands in graphics etc. .
Those topics don't concern me... if you want to try, go ahead. I just won't change the license of my contributions to allow you to reach that goal, if that's what you, as a project, desire.
I very rarely (or never, probably) get involved and contribute with projects with licenses allowing that, or with exceptions to let the project run in essentially control-freak I'll-sue-your-ass-and-forbid-porn-
and-WiFi-and-what-not platforms like Apple's.
Its alarming if [Wesnoth] have massive issues with an IPhone port.
Don't take my word for granted, I only clicked in a couple of links to get to the status of the iPhone port, I didn't follow closely and I don't know what's the reason that they abandoned the port, or if there are similar efforts to port to other places.
It's only that this discussion brough to my memory the licensing debates of them, and how it harmed the community, and how ultimately the non-clear licensing and wanting to publish in these AppStuff platform harmed them more in the long term than anything else.
