On Wed, 2009-06-24 at 14:08 +0200, Øyvind Harboe wrote: > Hi Dominic, > > first of all: there is every evidence that the technical problems > that USB are encountering these days will be resolved *LONG* > before any change in license could be effecuated. > > I even believe that USB problems will be fixed before the community will have > finished debating the ramifications of a specific license change > proposal(none has been posted so far). > > About GPL that was there from the start: > > One of the *main* reasons I decided to get into OpenOCD at revision 214 (or > was it before?) was that I felt confident that the GPL license protected > my interests and that a pure GPL license *without* any exceptions was > the least of evils. I saw downsides and upsides, but overall I felt that > pure GPL was a good choice. There was/is lots of non-GPL alternatives > out there that I would have considered instead of OpenOCD. > > Even more important, I knew that the license could not be changed > after I and others had made non-trivial changes without me & the > community having an oportunity to veto it. > > After a while I saw that enough work was put down into the GPL license > that changing it became impractical for better or worse. > > One of the nice things about GPL is that it is impossible to put GPL on > a project first, then a couple of years later say "Ha! I really intended not > GPL but some other license...". Nobody will sue you if you stick to > the GPL license that you put down in the first place, but if you start > to say "I really intended something else than I wrote down", then you're > on a slippery slope.
This is an excellent point regarding the invalidity of "I actually meant for the license to X". Would everyone be so keen to accept this if it were put into terms where X was "take freedoms from all of you chumps?" Coincidentally, that is exactly how I interpret the attempt to relicense the changes to allow an exception for proprietary linkage. At this point, there do not appear to exist any reasonable basis for arguing against this fact: the GPL was always the license for OpenOCD. Arguments to dispute this fact need to provide convincing evidence, and I think the repository justifies our position here -- not an exception. Cheers, Zach _______________________________________________ Openocd-development mailing list Openocd-development@lists.berlios.de https://lists.berlios.de/mailman/listinfo/openocd-development
