On Mon, 8 Aug 2005, Bob Van Zant wrote: >An argument showing that at this point the most important thing for Binc >is to gain more corporate involvement would definitely sway me toward >advocating a BSD-style license (whereas now I'm just pointing out its >merits).
I'm sorry Bob, but the BSD license gives us nothing. The GPL says that modified code can't be distributed in binary form without also shipping the code, which strongly emphasizes that modifications are made public. The BSD license is just "here, take it and use it as you like, I don't care, just put my name in a comment somewhere". The only reason anyone contributes to BSD licensed projects with their in-house developed extensions is because they're nice guys. ;-). The GPL does not define distribution. It also does not cover linking, or C/C++ headers/prototypes with inlined code. It doesn't even cover interpreting, or JIT compilation, or any of these things that are becoming very common today. More importantly, it does not define plugins or extensions. It's all GPL, and then it's all GPL. Discussions are going on the web about whether non-GPL licensed Java bytecode compiled classes can be used when writing GPL code. Or whether MySQL's GPL plugin API can be used to write closed source database handles. Can I write a backend for Binc IMAP and keep it closed? If you change Binc's sources, _no_. Not if you distribute it. The vagueness of the term "distribution" is terrible. If a consultant writes an extension to Binc IMAP for a 20000 employee company operating in 20 countries, and this server is copied in binary form and sold to all its divisions, you could still say it's not distribution because it's inside the same company. My point, for Binc IMAP, is that the GPL does not allow companies to write backends for the server and distribute that backend (or the whole modified product) in binary form, and that's regardless of how well defined our API is. And I'd like for them to be able to do that. Andy :-) PS: This is why GTK and KDElibs are LGPL, and why Qt is GPL with an exception that allows linking against other libraries. Believe me, if these libs could have been pure-GPL licensed then they probably would have been. -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
