On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 7:37 AM, Dave Neary <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Linus decided that Bitkeeper was fine for his needs, and started using > it and publishing his repository in a public Bitkeeper repository. > Bitkeeper guy (Larry McVoy) gave free copies of the client to free > software developers. [...]
Thankyou Dave that was a very insightful read for me, as far as I can see the risks at hand involve a hypothetical situation where the community gets addicted to a non-free extension of Glade, my relicensing of Glade does not go beyond LGPL, and to keep us in check, I definatly invite more freedom lovers to contribute and spread the ownership of authorial copyright thinner ;-) I was at first ambivalent about the licensing of the plugins for libgladeui use as a Gtk+ interface designer (soon libgladeui will not have a runtime dependency on gtk+ at all), after discussing it further with my main Glade colleague Juan; I am confidant that we also want them LGPL. Making non-free extensions of Glade possible does not mean that free Glade will not exist. I welcome the competition firstly, and Juan and I still strongly agree that allowing non-free extensions of Glade will help to attract a larger user base to Gtk+, which consists of free and proprietary softwares alike. I am not here to deny anyone free use of Glade, that would include any company who might need to write a proper sdk for their GNU/Linux based embedded/handheld/realtime/insert-flavour-here platform. On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:41 PM, Richard M. Stallman <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Not to metion the fact that merely using the non-free program > sends the message that non-free software is ok. [...] Commercial software endevours as it stands are already high-risk affairs, we need people to build cathedrals out of our bazaar, these are valuable endevours that help alot with innovation and computing on a whole, cathedrals that dont have a proper bazaar as their foundation will come crashing down with security holes, careless mistakes and downright lack of public scrutiny (we've all seen it before). This is a lesson that commercial vendors will have to learn the hard way, and if free software is anywhere near as superiour as I believe it to be, commercial vendor's success will inevitably be measured by their willingness to cooperate (give and take) with the bazaar that is free software. When such an endevour is actually successful, realistically they only have a year or two until someone has come up with a free solution for their project, which is a fair lapse of time if you ask me, not more, not less. So I would have to thank them for coming up with something that we havent already thought of ourselves, and even prototyping it for us in a product. If you really think that selling any software is not OK, to the point of which using any proprietary software sends a bad message, I can only say dont use proprietary software at all, I wont stand in the way of your freedom in a consumers market to use a free or proprietary tool for your own purposes. Regards, -Tristan _______________________________________________ foundation-list mailing list foundation-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-list