On 2013-01-22, at 1:33 AM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > > Is this a straight either/or? Surely it's a "social pressure OR social > pressure and licensing"?
indeed > I think there are good examples, even in our space, of licensing working > as a tool to encourage useful code publication. WebKit Core is LGPL, and > Apple publishes its modifications to it on release in 2003. Other bits > are BSD, and were only open-sourced when Apple decided it wanted to, > which was in mid-2005. Good data. > >> - history (e.g. DVCS'es, github) has >> shown (IMO) that encouraging forking ends up resulting in more code >> being published than focusing on merging. > > That may well be true; however, to make it support your point you would > need to show that copyleft-licensed code is less forked than > non-copyleft code. No, I'm not arguing against copyleft -- I'm just arguing that IMO copyleft is less important now than it once was. (The question you're asking is an interesting one, which presumably could be estimated, but I don't have the answer) > Where on your list of criteria is "protect contributors against legal > action"? If it's somewhere near the top, how much value do you place on > the patent clauses in e.g. MPL and Apache? My understanding of the relevant parts of the world is so fuzzy that I don't have much of a "position on the list". In general, legal risk is something that I'd like to weigh relative to likelihood of a suit, etc., which I wouldn't want to do without legal advice and a specific context. I expect our answer might be different for e.g. FirefoxOS vs. some internal tool. --da _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
