On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 16:07:33 +1000 Dan <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> babbled: > It's Friday, and I'm not doing any more coding, so I'll weigh in on this > one :) > > I was somewhat surprised when I realised that all Enlightenment stuff is > BSD. > > The GPL license offers protection from predatory bodies - mainly > corporations - from taking your code and building on it without giving > those changes back. This seems like a good protection to me. The > consensus here seems to be that the BSD license gives them the most > freedom. That may be so, but it also offers no protection. Say for > example Microsoft or Apple or some other company come along and lift > your code, incorporating it in their next product, but adding a couple > of thousand hours of work to it. They of course don't give anything back > to the original authors. Wouldn't that worry people? Perhaps it would > never happen, but then again perhaps it would. > > The 'freedom' arguement also ignores the fact that people can > dual-license their code. Why not negotiate a dual-license deal with > developers so that the code that is released to the public is GPL, but > the developers get offered a BSD-licensed copy? > > Not being an Enlightenment developer at the moment ( Perl's the limit > ... whatever happened to those Perl bindings, by the way ), I'm not > particularly bothered either way. I suppose I'm more curious. Of course > I respect the developers' choice to put whatever license they want on > their code, but I'd like to hear more from people who have the time to > respond why they see the BSD is better for them than the GPL - > especially when there are options like dual-licensing.
OK. I guess this topic has done the rounds years ago and time is for a new one. i emphasise that this is a PERSONAL OPINION base on experience, knowledge of industry, technical facts, and all the licenses in question as well as others out there. fact: once source is available it IS able to be stolen. the chances of being able to lift large chunks of useful code (eg take the image scaling routines or the alpha blending routines) which is where a lot of the really tight code is, is tirival. no one would ever know. reformat it a bit and that's it. there is very little you can do. you will never know its stolen. its part of a much larger codebase that suddenly is faster and nicer. we have not the resources to litigate nor the time to scour the world looking for code and products that may have possible used the code, disasembling their machnie code and hunting for patterns that might possibly indicate our code (and a bit of reformatting - if u loop one way or another) can even make this entirely pointless. theft is trivial. not getting caught is easy as pie. accept it. even if they dont steal the code - they can READ it and find the IDEAs and HOW to do it then re-implement (alomsot identically). this doesnt violate even the gpl. now in an attempt to have an olive branch stretched out to the world that doesnt eat, sleep, breathe open source, we are making the barrier of entry lower but not REQUIRING they ship source. they have other options. shipping source is one way of meeting attribution clauses. others are to advertise or to simply tell the develoeprs about the use of it. as a matter of FACT that if they take code and dont give back - they bear the burdern of maintenance and handling a fork. they will find it hard to incorproate new improvements and eventually due to practical concernns will be driven back to the main tree and realise it is better for them to give back what they do - if anything, and save costs. also note - a lot of things are LIBRARIES - they mostly will not GIVE BACK as they build ontop of an api. their IP is in their app, not the lib. if they find a bug - it helps them to submit a patch as that patch is then in upstream and they dont have to maintain a fork. they can concentrate on their own product and not worry about a slew of libraries etc. they are using the api of. they have much fewer license concerns. for the "open soruce world" the lbiraries are as open - if not more so, than most, so nothing lost there. and finally - i went with this license because frankly - i accepted long long long ago that peolpe will take and NOT GIVE BACK. they do it with gpl - and they do it in terms of download then ask for support - and support takes time. time costs money. thus effectively they are taking and NOT giving back. they will never write a single patch or a line of code. they will use it and ask for support/help - EVEN IF the help is IN documentation - they dont read it. they prefer to write an email to a developer and get a personalised response. dont worry about licenes - this is the WORST problem with open source. by FAR. companies are unlikely to just "steal". thats the view of those that hate anything commercial. practicality is that the companies need some support - will ask a bit, realise they use up your time and offer to PAY you for it and PAY for patches, custom code ans support BECAUSE the license is muchmore open. this helps you get some minimal money for your hard work - better than $0. note - we dont get paid ANYTHING to produce E related code. it's produced out of sheer love, sweat and tears. for all the students out there - this stuff is done in time on evenings and weekends after exhausting days of work. year in and year out. for peolpe with jobs personal time is precous and worth a lot to them personally - so in working on e we invest much of ourselves in it. we are a project with $0 funding. unlike many other projects of similar visibility, no company has stepped forward to seriously partner with us to fund its development (thus it moves very slowly). over the years there have been times when me, or mandrake or mej have had paid work time to work on things. but those have been minimal in the scheme/lifetime of E. a BSD +attribution license is a way of extending an olive branch to companies possibly willing to put down some hard cash. we all have principles and stick to them like glue. i have had a few job offers before for large sums, BUT they would have meant an IP agreement that would mean i no longer could work on E as all my coding work would belong to the company. such offers i have turned down, even after negotiations and big carrots. if you cant, trust us that we have the interests of the project at heart and will maintain that, but in doing so we like to "bend with the wind" a bit more than most to achieve the goal. so... after a bit of length there - thats the reason i have used bsd licenses, and almost all of the core develoeprs agree with such licenses as being the way to go - we may simply think alike on the topic, but that is one thing that definitely binds us all together. -- ------------- Codito, ergo sum - "I code, therefore I am" -------------- The Rasterman (Carsten Haitzler) [EMAIL PROTECTED] 裸好多 Tokyo, Japan (東京 日本) ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
