Carsten Haitzler (The Rasterman) wrote: >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. > > I suppose a patent would be useful in this case :) Joke.
>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. > > This argument works when dealing with smaller organisations. I know that the KHTML people are pissed off with Apple ( who use KHTML in Safari ) for not following the 'spirit' of the GPL and detailing their changes in change logs, patches, etc, and actually participating in the community. They simply make the source of their derived works available, and people are left to wade through it and try to discover what's happened in the meantime. So the point is that they're not particularly worried about maintaining their own fork, and also that the GPL has at least given the KHTML developers *something*. I can certainly see smaller organisations being more willing to co-operate though. >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. > > Those are some damned good arguments. The purest in me doesn't like to admit this, but I see your reasoning now. Thanks for the response :) And thanks for all those blood, sweat and tears too :) Dan -- BEGIN-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS ------------------------------------------------------If you are not the CanIt administrator and you think this message is spam, please give the id 15359 and magic value e143ace4815a to [EMAIL PROTECTED] to be marked as spam. Teach CanIt if this mail (ID 15359) is spam: Spam: http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=s&i=15359&m=e143ace4815a Not spam: http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=n&i=15359&m=e143ace4815a Forget vote: http://entropy.homelinux.org/canit/b.php?c=f&i=15359&m=e143ace4815a ------------------------------------------------------ END-ANTISPAM-VOTING-LINKS ------------------------------------------------------- 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
