Antonis... Bluntly, I'm not interested in getting into a full-fledged political argument with you (or anyone on this list). But I will say a few things...
You seem to hold developers in low regard. Please consider: what happens to a project with no developers? I have said nothing against the developers of KDE, etc. There are many fine GPL/copyleft projects (if that is what you're getting at); Emacs is a sterling example. When CDE was commercial, *copyright holders* had full freedom --- corporate entities such as IBM, HP, etc. The actual developers were bound just as much by proprietary licensing as end users were. The MIT license is very short. You don't need to be a lawyer to understand it; you can just read it (that's one of its advantages). It certainly does not prohibit binary distribution. Permitting binary-only distribution (and redistribution!) does not necessarily mean you will be denied source code. FreeBSD is BSD licensed. This project has been very successful, and full source code is freely available. X-Windows is MIT licensed, and can be distributed binary-only (but you still use X, right?). You say you trust in the FSF; the FSF agrees that many of these permissive licenses qualify as free software licenses. If CDE moves to MIT or BSD, the SourceForge repo isn't going to disappear. Nobody is trying to take away your source code. Original Message From: Antonis Tsolomitis Sent: Thursday, June 14, 2018 04:24 To: cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net Subject: Re: [cdesktopenv-devel] Moving to MIT license On 14/06/2018 09:23 πμ, Matthew R. Trower wrote: > Antonis Tsolomitis <antonis.tsolomi...@gmail.com> writes: > >> And what people mean by "LGPL is restrictive" ? Restrictive for who? > For any developer touching the code. Exactly. So when someone says "restrictive" it makes no sense. S/he must say "restrictive to the developer and permissive to the user". GPL is not restrictive to the user. And by the way, Gnome, KDE etc developers what are they? different species? Moreover, when CDE was commercial, developers of CDE had full freedom. Did you see the project survive or progress ? It was trapped to extinction. I remember... I bought it and never used it because it was unusable on the next RedHat release. I am not a lawyer either. So I have learned a simple thing. To trust FSF more than anything else on such issues. And I dislike binary distribution without the source code and the right to further modify it. If for example (I am not sure), MIT allows "binary only" distribution without releasing the source code and the right to modify, I am against it. Antonis. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Check out the vibrant tech community on one of the world's most engaging tech sites, Slashdot.org! http://sdm.link/slashdot _______________________________________________ cdesktopenv-devel mailing list cdesktopenv-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/cdesktopenv-devel
