On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 9:43 PM, Noel J. Bergman <n...@devtech.com> wrote:
[...] their downstream code cannot be used. Hence, the best outcome under the current licensing regime is for all core development to be done here, and for TDF to be a downstream consumer. Just because you choose a particular license that does not make you de-facto 'upstream'. Let assume that in a parallel universe you happened to put your and on a full Linux snapshot relicensed under ALv2. Do you really think that you can then proclaim yourself 'upstream' of Linux and start telling Linus, Greg, Alan and other: hey guys... since we don't want to^H^H^Hcan't take you patches, from now on _we_ get to run the show... but don't worry, you can still translate /Documentation and write user-space code... or you can come work for me, under _my_ terms... your 'choice'. And of course make that bold statement even before you read the code, figure out how to build it or even figure out what you want to try to do with it and how.... How do you think that would fly ? let me push that a bit further, to illustrate how ludicrous and fallacious that license argument for upstream is. Let's say I have few millions to spare and I outbid IBM to buy OOo from Oracle... then I license the whole thing under a 'you can do what ever-you-want license without attribution', but I demand that to accept any code back, you have to assign copyright to me and renounce any right on the code you contribute, including any 'attribution'... in these conditions the code could flow from me to Apache, but not the other way around. Does that make me 'upstream' ? Furthermore, you got to choose: either you make car-part of you make a car... but you can't do both and expect other cars to be built upon your parts... unless you presume that every other car manufacturer should happily and gratefully turn into a neighborhood custom-shop. not to mention that is is much harder to stay objective with the design decisions of parts - to make them generally useful - when you have a specific car in mind... and that doesn't even require malice or ill-intent.. it is a normal drift... If you build speedometer with the US market in mind, because that is where the car you're making is going to be sold, you may have the tendency to optimize things for mph... and not even consider kph... In short, sure the license is a problem for me, but if Apache provide good parts, I'll have no qualm using them, and if I do and if I can be useful, I'd probably also set my licensing view aside punctually for pragmatical reason and send patches on the other side of the fence.. But right now the main turn-off is the arrogance of all these would-be 'upstreamers', based on no other basis or 'merit' than the fact that IBM chose them to dump 8+ millions line of C++ (and 2000+ makefile that need OOo-customized GPLed-program to build... but that's another story). In these circumstance, I'm moving to Missouri ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Missouri#State_nickname ) Norbert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
