I’d like to add voice to Henri’s opinion here, because it’s important.
The pivotal part of this discussion is about the precedent this establishes and the long-term repercussions it will have. On 15 Apr 2014, at 02:35, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladim...@gmail.com> wrote: > Yes -- perhaps unsurprisingly, I disagree with Gerv on some of the > particulars here. Gerv's opinions are his own, and are not official Mozilla > policy. That post I'm sure came out of a discussion regarding this very > issue here. In particular, my stance is that we build open source software > because we believe there is value in that, and that it is the best way to > build innovative, secure, and meaningful software. We don't build open > source software for the sake of building open source. Sounds like you already had this - possibly heated - discussion with Gerv; I _think_ that your last one-liner came from that frustration. Do I have to remind you that most of our contributors are here, helping us out in so many wonderful ways, because we’re doing things for the sake of open source? This is a _very_ slippery slope you’re treading. Even though Gerv’s post is not official Mozilla policy at all, I do like to pass it on as a great guideline for our various contributors to browse through. (until it becomes policy in some form, heh!) One thing I don’t understand, Vladimir, are the practical reasons behind your effort to ‘rush’ this to the tree. We’ve seen a similar ‘hype’ for connecting an innovative device to the web with the Kinect. A community of hackers promptly hacked together an open source driver and we saw many Youtube videos that demoed exciting practical applications. Soon thereafter Microsoft release the official, open source driver. Apart from the fact that this particular hype didn’t become mainstream, I can see the parallel with the Oculus VR: we need to have a free, reverse engineered driver or a fully open source official driver. I think Oculus will understand this IF they want a hacker community as large as can be to drive adoption (and sales). I know two of those Kinect hackers, who can roll an OpenVR driver as a contractor or something, I’m quite sure of that. If an OpenVR driver is needed at all. Why not use LibOVR/ SDK to produce the mind-blowing Youtube demo videos and develop the OpenVR driver in parallel? Mike. On 15 Apr 2014, at 09:08, Henri Sivonen <hsivo...@hsivonen.fi> wrote: > On Tue, Apr 15, 2014 at 1:41 AM, Vladimir Vukicevic <vladim...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> 1. Check in the LibOVR sources as-is, in other-licenses/oculus. Add a >> configure flag, maybe --disable-non-free, that disables building it. Build >> and ship it as normal in our builds. > > I think this would > a) set a terrible precedent that companies that do something > sufficiently cool can get Mozilla to add their non-Free code to > Firefox > b) lessen Oculus' incentive to work with us on option #2 below. > > So I'm opposed to this. > >> 2. Contact Oculus with our concerns about the license, and see if they would >> be willing to relicense to something more standard. > > I think we should pursue this. > >> The MPL might actually fit their needs pretty well > > Yes. Also worth noting about the special health-related limitation: > Sun had an anti-nuclear facility restriction in its Java license for > years. Yet, the sky did not fall when Sun relicensed Java under GPLv2, > which doesn't have field-of-use restrictions. > >> Any objections to the above, or alternative suggestions? This is a >> departure in our current license policy, but not a huge one. > > How is turning Firefox into non-Free software not a huge departure? > > -- > Henri Sivonen > hsivo...@hsivonen.fi > https://hsivonen.fi/ > _______________________________________________ > dev-platform mailing list > dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org > https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform _______________________________________________ dev-platform mailing list dev-platform@lists.mozilla.org https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-platform
