Hi Jon,
I appreciate your concerns and your willingness to express them. I
would like to say on Marc's behalf (and on my own, as a member
of the jBoss board) that the motivation is not ego--it is to ensure
that improvements to the jBoss container system are donated back
to the user community.
You also mentioned that your own opinion is that OSS authors
should get only credit for the work that they do. I'm sure that this is
a position for which arguments could be made. My opinion is that
people should work for the returns that they choose--and the
community can choose to provide those returns, or reject the
product.
The contributors to the jBoss project have done so under a license
that is intended to provide a "return" of rights to all further
improvements to the container--and as a result, a superior open-
source container for all to use.
If there is another license that can achieve these goals, that you
would find less objectionable, I would especially welcome that
contribution to the discussion. I don't believe the BSD license
qualifies (but I have been wrong about many things in my life thus
far, and have no intention of stopping now). This is not a criticism of
the BSD-style license or projects that use it--and how could it be,
with the wild success that some of them have had. But we think
that the GPL is right for jBoss.
In no way is the choice of license intended to prevent aggregation
with Tomcat, nor to the best of my knowledge does the board--or
the jBoss community in general--currently believe that this is the
result. This sort of opinion is not like source code; we can't compile
it and see it run (or not). I'm sorry about that. But there it is.
-Dan O'Connor
On 29 Oct 00, at 18:52, Jon Stevens wrote:
> on 10/29/2000 6:08 PM, "Nick Bauman" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> > Which to me means that the closest together the two can ever be is if
> > Tomcat talks to JBoss and vice versa via a network socket. Then the two
> > licenses can co-exist. Any code written to accept a Java interface after
> > that network socket speaks would negate the legality, so you are stuck
> > with something like http as your protocol. So why not just resort to
> > sharp sticks and rocks while we're at it?
> >
> > But then as someone just mentioned, it matters not a stitch what you or I
> > or Jon says, it matter what they lawyers say.
>
> Exactly...why not just simplify things for everyone involved and make it a
> BSD license. It is the lowest common denominator that still provides
> protection for receiving credit for the work you do (that is all that I
> personally think OSS authors should get).
>
> So far, I haven't even seen one valid excuse for using the GPL for JBoss in
> the first place. Bluntly, this whole debate is simply around the fact that
> Marc doesn't want to own up to the fact that he choose a bad license (the
> GPL) for his software and doesn't want to admit that he was wrong after
> everyone (including myself) told him that the GPL was a bad decision.
>
> The *really* silly thing here is that Marc thinks that by using the GPL he
> is protected against certain things when in reality the GPL doesn't protect
> him at all from what he wants protection for!
>
> All I can do at this point is sigh and shake my head in complete amazement.
>
> -jon
>
> --
> http://scarab.tigris.org/ | http://noodle.tigris.org/
> http://java.apache.org/ | http://java.apache.org/turbine/
> http://www.working-dogs.com/ | http://jakarta.apache.org/velocity/
> http://www.collab.net/ | http://www.sourcexchange.com/
>
>
