On Fri, 2012-08-17 at 11:37 +0200, Jacob Carlborg wrote: […] > What I meant was to avoid being forced to license your code under LGPL. > It's not just for proprietary code, there are also other open source > licenses which are not compatible with GPL.
Indeed. Sadly though, licences such as ASL 2.0, MIT, BSD, etc. allow the unscrupulous to use and make proprietary versions of codebases and continue to make use of updates provided for free by unpaid volunteers, whilst making money from their proprietary version. The permissive licences are fine for established codebases, e.g. Groovy, where there is no realistic opportunity for successful bad behaviour. For smaller, less well established codebases, it is possible and known to have happened. The strategy seems then to use LGPL as a FOSS start up and then relicence to a more permissive licence once you have a reasonable sized user base that protects against bas behaviour. None of this applies to systems that are necessarily distributed as source, for that case a whole different set of factors applies. -- Russel. ============================================================================= Dr Russel Winder t: +44 20 7585 2200 voip: sip:russel.win...@ekiga.net 41 Buckmaster Road m: +44 7770 465 077 xmpp: rus...@winder.org.uk London SW11 1EN, UK w: www.russel.org.uk skype: russel_winder
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
