Dear all,
> On 15 Dec 2014, at 11:10, Ludwig Ortmann <ludwig.ortm...@fu-berlin.de> wrote: > > As for the general topic of relicensing: Personally speaking I’m rather pragmatic on this topic and either license is fine for me *but* I tend to advocate for MIT. ad "contributing back”: Apart from companies practicing an open source culture forcing those others to open their changes doesn’t imply for me RIOT will actually benefit from these. Opening their changes doesn’t mean these will be opened in a way RIOT maintainers know about it. They simply have to put them somewhere publicly accessible. While with a non-restrictive license we could get the contributions (maybe also in a better shape in terms of coding style and quality) from those who’d do it with LGPL and maybe broaden the basis and convince others (by improvements and further development on RIOT’s master) to consider opening their changes to not get left behind. * As Emmanuel put it, it is a bet we will have to place. ad “mimic Linux’s story“: Looking into Linux’s story is and was very unique and GPL is no guarantee against patent trolls. Additionally I think today we are embedded in an even faster moving/developing environment with a big challenge arising next October in form of mbed OS. The biggest blocker implied by LGPL I see is that someone providing RIOT driven hardware has to provide means to re-flash the devices with self compiled binaries. At least that’s what I understood in past discussions and what I simply can’t imagine to become widely adopted. IMHO I think in the short and mid term it is greatly beneficial at least one big player taking up on RIOT providing resources to maintain and improve it and the whole surrounding quite changed since Linux emerged. Also as most “bigger” open source projects are in some sort backed by a company to ensure development, we are dealing with companies (I’m mainly referring to HW aspect here) who are not used to deal with open source by now. Taking this into account I don’t believe RIOT’s technical advantages can prevail the concerns for many companies. ** To sum up, I would like to see RIOT as wide spread as possible and thereby promote (at least) open networking standards and I think RIOT licensed under MIT has the highest chance to succeed in this. *** Best, Thomas * Philosophical question: If we take open source software as an altruistic approach to publish software for the greater good wouldn’t it be contradictory to tell others to give something in return and exclusionary to those who simply can’t? ** My (limited) experience from working for HW manufacturers is more like “don’t even mention these three evil letters”. This matches Emmanuel’s and Matthias’ experiences quite well. *** In my personal Utopia we wouldn’t have to discuss this but would be consensus to open all code for the greater good but the above thoughts come to my mind when reality hits me. _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@riot-os.org http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
