Hi, I figured I may respond because I may be one of those you think are being religious and I aren't .. honest ;) At 07:18 27/10/00 -0700, Jon Stevens wrote: >on 10/27/2000 4:47 PM, "marc fleury" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Re: the licenses. I read many of the arguments regarding the licenses. >> There seems to be much misinterpretation of what the GPL requires. Sun and >> SAP are going with the GPL for some things (staroffice, SAP-DB), and MPL/APL >> for some others (netbeans)... > >True. Not everything needs to be APL. In fact, I think things like the Linux >kernel really should be under a GPL license because it provides enough of a >base that people can depend on it being always available as OSS. I agree there is a lot of cases where GPL (or more often LGPL) is completely warranted. It follows the basic tenets set out in one of Eric S. Raymond's papers. Not sure which thou they can be got via http://www.tuxedo.org/%7Eesr/writings/ . The more "vital" a software the more likely it is to be OSS in general and GPL in particular. As time goes on the definition of "vital" moves up software chain. ie Originally the vital components were an OS and compiler/libraries. As time went on it became desktop which you can see in Gnome Foundation. Further along even more stuff will fall into OSS/GPL. Note that it is rarely the case that any of these projects do anything innovative they are mainly immitators (which I consider a good thing). Innovation tends not to work well with GPL for a number of reasons that I not gonna go into (but I believe the above link may discuss them or at least provide links to them). I am not saying it is easy to comply with GPL because it is just plain impossible in some cases (ie your case where you require access to non-GPL compatable code ala JMs/JMX/EJBs etc). Even people who know what they are doing (ie longtime GNU developers) can misuse/misapply the GPL (ie glibc was in direct violation of GPL for sometime). However I find it unacceptable to claim to be GPL but not actually be. >> There doesn't need to be a unique license, and >> it seems to me the APL folks are on a religious endeavour these days (used >> to be the case with GPL, funny how things work out :). > >It will always be about religion because we have different views on how >source code should be made available and used by people. If you are referring to me when you indicate "APL folks are on a religious endeavour" then you are wrong. FWIW APL is not even my preferred license* but I do feel it is innapropriate to misuse licenses. As I said, GPL is very easy to misuse because it is very difficult to understand (unless of course you are half-lawyer ;]) * I would license under LGPL + exceptions for std java extentions + exceptions for other free products where free is defined by GNU/Debian >For example, right >now, you choose the GPL because you feel that you should be able to get the >changes back, but at the same time, you have a problem with the GPL being >viral so you give exceptions for people to use JBoss. Instead, what you >should do is probably be using the MPL license which will solve your needs >without having to constantly grant exceptions to people. right - theres an article in GNU philosophy section which discusses this aspect - it has a particular viewpoint but it would be useful I suspect ;) >It is funny to me how you say that you are integrating our code which I >think is great, but the real issue is that we can't integrate YOUR code >because you choose to use the GPL license. Ironically enough I just spent 4 hours rewriting proxy generation code - just like that which is in jBoss. I would have much preferred to use code straight from jBoss but I had no choice but to reinvent the wheel. There were other things in jBoss that I would love to use but again - I can't and will have to rewrite it in the future. Not something I am a fan of. There are at least three projects (Apache avalon, apache tomcat and lutris enhydra) that could work well if it was possible to collaborate. The above three can work together as they have compatable licenses but we can not collaborate with jBoss which I find unfortunate. BTW I will be attempting to make APL compatable with GPL as soon as I get the time (and thus you could use it legally). There is one clause (that I am aware of) that makes it incompatable - namely the clause that states you must not use Apache name. However this clause is adequetly covered by trademark law and removal from APL would not lessen the penalty for someone who infringes this. I don't know how to do this atm (I assume I lobby PMC members) but hopefully it can be altered ;) In which case would you guys ever considering allowing a less restrictive license to enable collaboration ? Cheers, Pete *------------------------------------------------------* | "Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want | | to test a man's character, give him power." | | -Abraham Lincoln | *------------------------------------------------------* --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
