Hello,
I'm not absolutely against licence switch but... I actually feel uneasy
about about this kind of demands...
If I understand right, some corporations which have probably contributed
nothing to the project just barges in and said : "if you want us to use
your work, you have to let us make whatever we want with it, ask nothing
in return, no code contribution, no financial help (since this is free
software), nothing". To be honest, I find this kind of behavior quite...
displaced.
If I'm not mistaken, LGPL absolutely doesn't impose anything on the
applications made with RIOT OS, only that changes made *into* the OS are
contributed back. How could that harm a business that use RIOT (at not
cost, remember) to build its solution? Of course, I'm no specialist,
maybe there something I'm missing here, but...
Moreover, with that software patent crap that flourishes almost
everywhere out of EU (and maybe even here in the future), wouldn't that
change make us vulnerable to being sued for just developing our own
code? As Rene Kijewski said, if we must change, we should find a license
that protects us from that kind of trap...
Of course, it's good to broaden RIOT community, but what kind of members
will be attracted by that kind of move? I can just wonder.
Best regards,
KR
PS: sorry for my lack of contribution these last weeks, I'm finishing
some paper submissions, and will be able to get back with some
interesting element soon.
Le 03/12/2014 22:59, Emmanuel Baccelli a écrit :
Dear RIOTers,
we have been receiving an increasing amount of negative feedback from
various companies concerning the practical usability of our LGPL license
in their context, being a show-stopper.
For this reason, INRIA, Freie Universitaet (FU) Berlin and Hamburg
University of Applied Science (HAW) are currently considering changing
the license of their contributions to RIOT to a less restrictive license
(i.e. BSD, potentially as soon as next release).
Such a switch to BSD is betting that the effect of a potentially smaller
percentage of user/devel contributing back to the master branch will be
dwarfed by the effect of a user/devel community growing much bigger and
quicker. This seems doable considering the current momentum around RIOT.
In a second phase, if such a license switch takes place for INRIA/FU/HAW
contributions, we would then contact other contributors individually, to
check their status concerning a similar switch for their own contributions.
But in the first place, we would like to debate this topic. In
particular: is anyone violently opposing the idea of migrating to a less
restrictive license, such as BSD? If so, why? On the other hand, if you
explicitly support the license change, feel free to indicate this as
well. Please send your opinion to the list before Dec. 10th.
Cheers,
Emmanuel
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Kévin Roussel
Doctorant, projet LAR
Équipe MADYNES, INRIA Nancy Grand-Est / LORIA
Tél. : +33 3 54 95 86 27
kevin.rous...@inria.fr
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