While in general I try to steer clear from licensing discussions these days (been too long a part of the Linux crowd in general and LKML in particular), I do strongly feel that we should not dilute the ASL by making "an exception" or "changing a default license".
The good thing about the ASL (unlike GPL) is, that it does not scare commercial adopters and contributors away. Having something "GPL compatible" means IMHO that some of these will be advised by their lawyers not to come to Harmony. Most people that advocate GPL or a GPL-like license over the ASL want to "make sure that their code cannot be exploited by commercial companies to make a buck from it". Which is a political position that IMHO is not compatible with the whole idea of the ASF. I'd like to point out the last sentence of http://www.apache.org/licenses/GPL-compatibility.html "The ASF will not dual-license our software because such licenses make it impossible to determine the conditions under which we have agreed to collaborate on a collective product, and are thus contrary to the Apache spirit of open, collaborative development among individuals, industry, and nonprofit organizations." And personally, I'd like to keep it that way. Less politics, rough consensus and running code. If we change any part of a project away from ASL and towards a "GPL compatible license", then we will sooner or later enter a flamew^Wdiscussion about some contribution on the mailing list that was intended by the author as a "poison pill" into our code base. Been there, got burned and no T-Shirt. :-) Best regards Henning On Mon, 2005-07-25 at 16:46 -0400, Geir Magnusson Jr. wrote: > In it's first month+ of existence, Harmony has attracted quite a bit > of attention, and we are now settling down to resolve some of the > issues we've identified in the beginning. We have on our website our > proposed policy framework to monitor contributions and technology > contributions. This policy is in addition to the standard ASF policy > and we do not believe that it will cause any concerns. It will be > posted for review by the Apache Incubator PMC before it goes into > effect, but we're working to get the last nips and tucks done. > > On the technology side, there's been a slow start, in part due to the > contribution framework getting established, but I plan to push hard > for contributions now that we're almost done and people can get a > sense of how things work. > > We have the following outstanding issue that I will be talking to the > Apache Incubator PMC about - parts of the community have asked that > we change our default license for mail list contributions to a > license compatible with the GPL, as the Apache License is deemed > incompatible by the FSF. It's in our interest to ensure that we can > have the broadest participation possible, but also recognize that we > wish to balance that with the aspects of the Apache License that are > important to us. Expect more on this soon. > > geir --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
