The only concern about PD I have is that it is just that: public domain. Anyone can take what we have and do whatever they want with it, including marketing it commercially. In other words, PD may be too a broad license. Do we care?
No. If someone wants to take the MC IDE (MINUS the engine - since that's
proprietary) and do something with it, more power to 'em. It's like
trying to sell a car without an engine...
Ken that's not the point. The only issue here is about user modifications of code and components and whether these are required by the licence to be submitted back to the project.
With a public domain style license such as the MIT licence they are not, which means that a company can use the MC IDE, or take code and components from the IDE, modify them with some lovely improvements and then protect the stack / code so that no-one else can benefit from these improvements. There are three ways people tend to take this:
1) Some people consider this stealing free code donated by other people and then charging for it - like we do with the environment - and get all irate.
2) Others take a pragmatic approach and look at which licence stimulates the evolution of (their) public code most.
3) Others still take a competative approach and ask which license best supports the evolution of (their) public code in the face of competition with the commercial sector.
The only consideration I suspect interests this list is 2) - which approach stimulates the evolution of the IDE most. This is a long term consideration as in the short term all we are doing is maintaining a static IDE with a few tweaks here and there.
That is the thing about evolution and open source change happens by small incremental changes (save the odd Revolution :) which build on each other to make a big difference. The importance of each change is not noticed at the time.
I feel that this is important to our community because while we have one of the best tools on the market and probably the best user community, we have a problem evolving the contributions we make. How many people out there have been a little dissapointed after submitting a udeful contribution and finding that they less than they hoped in terms of user improvements?
I feel we have a chance to start in a small way to create an environment which addresses this with the MC IDE being made open source by Scott. I agree with Richard that we should start by just maintaining the IDE, but by learning from the open source community how best to do this, we are more likely to avoid this project stagnating into nothing more than a dead end archive, and give it a chance to evolve into something much more interesting. Choosing the right license is a part of this.
This just emphasises the importance of the choice (it is important even though most users don't really give a fig :) The argument regarding the choice between public domain (such as the MIT style open source initiative OSI licence) and the lesser GPL (LGPL) licence is all about which achieves this evolution most effectively.
Some (more recently) argue that the very restrictions (cohersion) in LGPL style licenses actually hinder the process by putting people off (notably companies that have a problem with the inability to protect their code improvements), others insist that without this the quality of the public code deteriorates over time. There is no consensus on this point - although I detect a slow shift in preference for public domain style licenses in the open source community.
I don't usually like long rants about licenses on public lists - so i hope my 2 cents worth hasn't bored everyone, and i'd usually recommend taking this sort of discussion off list into an interested subgroup (reporting back) - but Richard bullied me into this :)
_______________________________________________ metacard mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://lists.runrev.com/mailman/listinfo/metacard
