On 17 May 2016 at 13:24, Graeme Geldenhuys <mailingli...@geldenhuys.co.uk> wrote:
> Mattias already answered the question. “Free” is a relative term in the > open source world. Why must some code be excluded from Lazarus, even > though it is still open source - albeit with a different license. > One can also call a piece of code "free" which allows distribution of source but forbids distribution in compiled form, but then that would render it "free" but useless. I regret referring to the term "free", because everybody has their own understanding of what it means. If a developer uses every willy nilly component out there, and never > checks any license details of those components, they are looking for > trouble. As a developer, part of your job is to ensure whatever 3rd > party components you use fits in with your project goals. > Again, this is an extreme, let's narrow it down. I am talking about official bundled components. Of course, when a developer decides to use a 3rd party component it is natural to check the licensing terms of that component. However, when a developer uses an official distribution of IDE, whether it is Lazarus or Delphi or other, it is not natural to require developer to check *every component or part* for licensing terms, which can be hundreds or even thousands of individual parts. That is why I thought it could be clearer if most of Lazarus/FPC code base is under the same licensing schema, while everything that falls outside of it could be easily discovered (this is where an idea of placing such code into a dedicated folder came about). This kind of approach would drastically simply code base slicing based on licensing terms, that is what Debian packagers have to do with Lazarus and many other packages. Denis
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