On 10 Feb 2007, at 19:44, Hubert Chan wrote:
AFAIK, Etoile tries to keep thing under the LGPL or BSD licenses.
Although there are components that are GPLed, it seems that the
general effort is to avoid causing things to be GPLed.
Can someone confirm this? I remember it was mentioned on the list
before, and I'm sure I saw it on the wiki at some point, but I
can't find it right now (the search functionality on the wiki seems
to be broken)
I would aim to avoid the GPL or other viral licenses for anything
other than applications. While I don't particularly want any non-
Free software on Étoilé, it is important to allow developers the
freedom to pick their license. Having GPL'd core libraries would
prevent anyone using a GPL-incompatible Free Software license (e.g.
the ASL, APSL, CDDL or MPL) for Étoilé software, which would
potentially reduce the amount of applications available for Étoilé.
Note that this restriction doesn't necessarily apply in reverse; we
could import APSL components[1] and still have GPL'd applications as
long as the APSL components were treated as core system components.
Anything I contribute is under the three-clause (GPL-compatible) BSD
license, which is compatible with pretty much any other license.
GPL'd applications are fine, since they enrich the user experience
but don't tie developers to the GPL for their own code unless they
contribute directly to that application. The situation is slightly
blurred when it comes to components; I haven't read the GPL (v2) for
a few years, so I'm not sure exactly how it relates to loosely-
coupled systems. I suspect it would be fine since it only relates to
distribution, and components would be composed by the end user (the
GPL can't restrict this without violating the FSF's zeroth freedom),
although GPLv3 has a few EULA-like conditions that might make this a
problem.
David
I-am-not-an-IP-lawyer-but-I-play-one-on-the-Internet
[1] The Apple Objective-C runtime is APSL'd, and I am half-tempted to
suggest that we import it, although not very loudly.
_______________________________________________
Etoile-dev mailing list
[email protected]
https://mail.gna.org/listinfo/etoile-dev
