On Jul 26, 2005, at 2:04 AM, Henning Schmiedehausen wrote:
While in general I try to steer clear from licensing discussions these
days (been too long a part of the Linux crowd in general and LKML in
particular), I do strongly feel that we should not dilute the ASL by
making "an exception" or "changing a default license".
The good thing about the ASL (unlike GPL) is, that it does not scare
commercial adopters and contributors away. Having something "GPL
compatible" means IMHO that some of these will be advised by their
lawyers not to come to Harmony.
The modified BSD, X11, and the Intel license are GPL compatible :)
Most people that advocate GPL or a GPL-like license over the ASL
want to
"make sure that their code cannot be exploited by commercial companies
to make a buck from it". Which is a political position that IMHO is
not
compatible with the whole idea of the ASF.
I'd like to point out the last sentence of
http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html
"The ASF will not dual-license our software because such licenses make
it impossible to determine the conditions under which we have
agreed to
collaborate on a collective product, and are thus contrary to the
Apache
spirit of open, collaborative development among individuals, industry,
and nonprofit organizations."
And personally, I'd like to keep it that way. Less politics, rough
consensus and running code. If we change any part of a project away
from
ASL and towards a "GPL compatible license", then we will sooner or
later
enter a flamew^Wdiscussion about some contribution on the mailing list
that was intended by the author as a "poison pill" into our code base.
First, understand what we are doing. The Harmony project code will
generally be under the Apache License v2 (or subsequent
versions...). Period. We may get pieces that are under compatible
licenses (such as MPL), just like other projects do, but we do want
to limit that as much as possible.
The issue we are dealing with is the default license for the mail
list. Right now, it's ALv2, just like every other list is,
implicitly. (We made it explicit). What I didn't want to have
happen is have someone later say "hey, that code that I submitted on
the mail list was intended to be under the GPL - you didn't make it
clear"
The problem we have run into is that there are community members who
wish to have at least the work that comes out of mail list
discussions to be able to be used in their GPL-ed code. Now, it's
our interest as a project to produce things with the widest
usability, and wish to ensure that the "free software" communities
are able to fully participate in what we are doing, and be able to
take the results of our architecture work and implement themselves,
to make more software interoperable.
geir
Been there, got burned and no T-Shirt. :-)
Best regards
Henning
On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 16:46 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote:
In it's first month+ of existence, Harmony has attracted quite a bit
of attention, and we are now settling down to resolve some of the
issues we've identified in the beginning. We have on our website our
proposed policy framework to monitor contributions and technology
contributions. This policy is in addition to the standard ASF policy
and we do not believe that it will cause any concerns. It will be
posted for review by the Apache Incubator PMC before it goes into
effect, but we're working to get the last nips and tucks done.
On the technology side, there's been a slow start, in part due to the
contribution framework getting established, but I plan to push hard
for contributions now that we're almost done and people can get a
sense of how things work.
We have the following outstanding issue that I will be talking to the
Apache Incubator PMC about - parts of the community have asked that
we change our default license for mail list contributions to a
license compatible with the GPL, as the Apache License is deemed
incompatible by the FSF. It's in our interest to ensure that we can
have the broadest participation possible, but also recognize that we
wish to balance that with the aspects of the Apache License that are
important to us. Expect more on this soon.
geir
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