Hi Paul, I am rapidly coming to the realisation that you are right.
I am very, very surprised by this. I had up until now been under the impression that there is far more development going on under the GPL or LGPL licenses. In fact I had been told that licensing something with the BSD license would be a major turn off to developers. Well, so far I have 6 people very interested, versus the three we had working on MPIR. I'm actually flabbergasted! Bill. On 13 April 2010 17:38, Xilman <paul.leyl...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Apr 12, 1:59 pm, Cactus <rieman...@googlemail.com> wrote: >> In my view GMP and MPIR are a total mess in software engineering terms >> and I would hence like nothing beeter than to participate in the >> development of a new, well structured multiple precision library under >> aa open source license that provided for commercial use. >> >> The number of comapnies who could benefit from this is very large and >> the individual cost would be small but we have no obvious way of >> orchestrating this. >> >> > It seems to me we have the worst of all worlds. We aren't funded, due >> > to our code being regarded with suspicion by companies who fear we are >> > trying to destroy them. And at the same time companies are free to >> > build their closed source products on top of our Open Source library. >> > Some (not all) of those companies, could definitely afford to fund a >> > project like MPIR, but wont. >> >> I agree. We could build a first class BSD licensed multiple precision >> library given modest sponsorsship. But while some major companies (not >> all) feel they can exploit open source developers whilst making no >> contributions to the development community in return, its hard to see >> this happening. > > I confess that I have never contributed code to MPIR, so please weight > my response correspondingly. > > I have a profound dislike of the GPL because of its restrictions. I > can just about live with LGPL 2 but am very, very wary of LGPL 3. In > this regard I seem to be in good company. Whenever I distribute > something it is always under a BSD-like license or something even more > permissive, such as renouncing all copyright interest. However, just > because I give something away I don't see why my recipients should be > forced to follow my philosophy. After all, they can not prevent me > also giving away my stuff to their competitors if I feel like it. > > Here's just one example of how I fell foul of the GPL. A colleague > wanted to run my code under Cygwin. I very happily supplied source > code but was unable to provide a pre-compiled binary and had to forbid > him to do the same. The reason: both of us had only the freeware > version of Cygwin and its license terms dictate that binaries linked > with Cygwin libraries *must* be released under the GPL. I find it > bizarre, and very sad, that the FSF prevents me from giving away > binaries even though I'm more than willing to give away full > sources. When I want to give something away I mean it to be as a > gift, not as a loan. That's why I'm sold on BSD-like licenses. > > It's just possible I may contribute code to a LGPL 2+ library. In > particular, I'm rather interested in parallel computation, including > GPGPU. It is very very unlikely that I will contribute to a LGPL 3 > library. It is much more likely that I'll contribute under a BSD- > like license. > > I've no idea whether I'm unique or unusual in my views. It may well > be that a significant number of other developers are also deterred > from contributing to MPIR by the LPGP license. > > Paul > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "mpir-devel" group. > To post to this group, send email to mpir-de...@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > mpir-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/mpir-devel?hl=en. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "mpir-devel" group. To post to this group, send email to mpir-de...@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to mpir-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/mpir-devel?hl=en.
