Hi
I guess there are a few members in the community, like myself, who have been
quietly watching this "discussion" about licences. It's sad to see it taking a
personal turn, which is very much against the spirit of Open Source, whether
you are in the GPL camp or not.
Projects like freerdp have always sat uncomfortably with the GPL because of
significant commercial interest in extending the technology. There is a lot of
naïveté among some in the community as to the idea of companies happily
contributing their source, and there is also a lot of violation.
I have experienced this struggle with rdesktop, especially when I wrote the
virtual channel plugin (funded by a big thin client manufacturer) which was
initially rejected because it allowed non-GPL shared objects to link to the
core app. Eventually I changed it to a pipes-based mechanism to comply and this
is now in wide commercial use AND companies are adapting it and feeding their
changes back in (although of course it never gets formally released in the
trunk because rdesktop releases are like unicorns :-)).
My point is that you can be GPL compliant and still meet commercial
obligations. The argument about having to do a lot of tedious rework because
"it turned out" that a part of the implementation wasn't compliant is to my
mind a false one. You know when you design a change whether it's going to be
compliant (or you ask the list if there's any doubt). If your project is GPL
and a change could only be made by violating that, then you can't make the
change. It's hard to see a scenario where there's not an alternative, though.
I'm not saying it's wrong to move away from GPL, I'm just saying that any
change should be based on principles, not just to make a technical change
easier. It doesn't need to be GPL, but I think it should still encompass the
same guiding principles. If however the move away from GPL were to weaken the
principles of "free software" and allow benefit without contribution, then we
would be making a mistake.
This isn't a flame. I just want to let you folks know how much your work is
appreciated, that there are others interested in making a contribution and that
it would be a shame if we were to let the wrong motivations change the
direction and/or principles of the project. Please guys, make the decision for
the right reasons and let's not descend to personal attacks. If we believe that
everyone on this list is here because we're interested in developing freerdp,
then we all deserve to be heard - right? :-)
Simon
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