[OT] open-source license issues

Daniel Gibson metalcaedes at gmail.com
Tue Apr 12 01:41:09 PDT 2011


Am 12.04.2011 10:29, schrieb spir:
> On 04/12/2011 09:05 AM, Andrew Wiley wrote:
>> On Tue, Apr 12, 2011 at 1:52 AM, Russel Winder<russel at russel.org.uk> 
>> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 2011-04-11 at 19:47 -0400, Nick Sabalausky wrote:
>>> [ . . . ]
>>>>
>>>> Regardless, I think we've clearly demonstrated the complete
>>>> impenetrability
>>>> of (L)GPL. I've long since given up trying to understand it, and I
>>>> seriously
>>>> doubt that anyone really truly understands it (it's the C++ of the
>>>> legal
>>>> world). Even if you do miraculously understand one form of it, there
>>>> still
>>>> probably about 10 other versions and half of them are even
>>>> incompatible with
>>>> each other (in poorly-understood ways). The whole thing's just a
>>>> damn mess.
>>>> I've always found it best to just avoid any (L)GPL source or library
>>>> outright. Not worth the trouble.
>>>
>>> GPL and LGPL are fine licences.  They only appear impenetrable because
>>> there is no case law in the USA or UK to define the accepted meaning as
>>> opposed to the intended meaning.  It may be that in countries that do
>>> not rely on case law to give meaning to statutes, contracts and licence,
>>> things are different.
>>>
>>> Personally I find licences such as BSD, MIT, ASL, etc. ones to avoid
>>> since they allow organizations to take software, sell it for profit and
>>> return absolutely nothing to the development community.  I think LGPL is
>>> the preferred licence for all non-proprietary software and am very glad
>>> to find libraries that use it.
>>>
>>> Sadly the Java world seems to have slipped from using LGPL to being
>>> obsessed with using ASL 2.0 and professing hatred of LGPL.  ASL 2.0
>>> claims to have a patent clause unlike all the other non (L)GPL licences,
>>> but until this is tested in court so that there is case law no-one, not
>>> even lawyers, actually know what the licences mean or entail.
>>
>> The Java world likes ASL precisely because software licensed under it
>> can be sold. Take a look at the signature lines of the main
>> contributors to large open source Java projects. It's common for large
>> companies to pay programmers to develop open source software that's
>> eventually shipped in products, and at the end of the day, the
>> community benefits.
> 
> This is complete misinterpretation. *All* free software can be sold.
> 
>> Now yes, it's entirely an honor system, and there's certainly a risk
>> involved, but in general, the ASL has made Java's open source
>> community grow quite a bit.
> 
> This is an empty assertion. Can you point to any study logically
> demonstrating any relation between Java's preferred license and "Java's
> open source community grow[ing] quite a bit"? Or even to a theoretical
> reason for this?
> 
> Denis

I don't have a study at hand, but companies often prefer BSD-style
licenses to the GPL because they want to be able to reuse the code in
their proprietary without open-sourcing them as well.
Example: Apple reimplements the samba-service (SMB - Windows file
sharing) because they don't like the GPLv3. And they push LLVM because
they don't want to use GCC anymore. (But maybe this is because of the
GPLv3 and not the GPL in general.)

Furthermore many (most?) Open Source Java projects are mainly developed
by companies and they chose this kind of license, so I think it's
reasonable to assume that they prefer this kind of license to the GPL
and wouldn't invest so much into these projects if they had a license
they disliked.

Cheers,
- Daniel


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