Hi, On Mon, Apr 20, 2009 at 10:31 PM, Allin Cottrell <cottr...@wfu.edu> wrote: > On Sun, 19 Apr 2009, Havoc Pennington wrote: >> The license was written by a lawyer and is perfectly sane. > > "Sane" and "written by a lawyer" are surely orthogonal to > desirability from the point of view of free software.
The contrast is with things like the Artistic 1.0 license, which is a legal mess written by a non-lawyer. That is not desirable because the license ends up vague (from a legal perspective) and difficult to enforce in court. AFL was written by an open source advocate (and lawyer) with input from a lot of other open source people. The point is, it's not some off-the-wall license made up over beers. It was written by someone competent to do so and vetted by quite a few others. It is an "approved license" on opensource.org. > IANAL, but... Hypothesis: Monster Corp distributes D-BUS under > AFL, while believing that DB in fact violates patents held by > Monster Corp. MC then sues users of DB. MC can no longer > distribute DB under AFL, but they don't care! They have succeeded > in causing trouble. But as Havoc says, if Monster Corp had > distributed DB under *GPL they would have effectively made a > patent grant and given up the right to sue, making this scenario > impossible. Yes, you're right that the AFL imposes fewer restrictions than GPL, just as any other MIT/X11 type of license imposes less restrictions than GPL. > OK, maybe there's no Monster Corp associated with D-BUS right now, > but we know there _are_ such monsters around. This seems to me a > _major_ reason to see *GPL as superior to AFL from the p.o.v. of > free software. The discussion is not about whether AFL (or MIT/X11 type licenses in general) are superior to GPL-type licenses philosophically. The discussion is about whether there's a licensing "problem" with libdbus that keeps GLib and GTK+ from relying on it. Last I checked, GTK+ at least linked to quite a bit of code under MIT/X11 sort of licenses, such as libX11. You aren't saying anything here that doesn't also apply to libX11. Havoc _______________________________________________ gtk-devel-list mailing list gtk-devel-list@gnome.org http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gtk-devel-list
