On Nov 30, 3:49 am, "Peter J. Farrell" <[email protected]> wrote: > Sean Corfield said the following on 11/30/2010 01:23 AM: > > It is worth pointing out that whilst GPL is the "purest" open source > > license, it is also the one that causes commercial companies the most > > grief - they prefer more "permissive" licenses like Apache. > > We discussed a long time about Apache versus GPL in regards to Mach-II. > The classpath exception we include literally gives the ability to bundle > with any commercial project as it stops the GPL license seeping into > your commercial code base. >
I think this is actually a really good solution, I know the concern of the GPL 'Infecting' software is a real issue for many companies and I don't blame them, As someone who's both a user and a developer the GPL is fickle, it giveth and it taketh away :S Personally I'm a fan of the BSD and LGPL license approaches, The BSD/MIT licenses are as free as it gets to a developer, and I think they promote the best code quality in the grand scheme of things, as the best code can be re-used anywhere in that or from that ecosystem without nearly so much of the legal tippy-toeing that has repeatedly burned me in trying to contribute to the CFML GPL ecosystem :P. It puts users at risk of closed source branches, but I think overall they benefit from the free exchange of code in that ecosystem. The LGPL I think strikes a good balance for frameworks and libraries, but isn't perfect. > We've had only one gripe about Mach-II switching from Apache to GPL V3 > with classpath exception. Thanks in advance for letting me keep the > exact details brief as I describe what happened. This "complaint" was > from a company (unknown to us) that had taken our code base, modified > it, add their own extensions and sold it as a commercial product (again, > unknown to us). Suffice it to say we were a little shocked considering > their licensing question was the first time we had heard of this company > and no contributions had ever been given back to the framework. > I'll admit that companies behavior is a little discouraging, But the appeal of many open licenses is exactly that, you can't be held hostage by the developer and are allowed to do any damn thing you please without an obligation to answer to them or contribute back to them (And in this case if that company wants to keep using the old version of Mach-II they can, so mission accomplished to some degree) Steve Streeting did a pretty good explanation of why, in his experience, it was more practical to just use MIT Licensing. My understanding of his post is that if someone's going to contribute back to a project they'll do so because they want to, not because someone is twisting their arm. Those who willingly contribute will always make up the core contributors, and those who close off and extend a project will be the minority and would likely not contribute back either way, Either by exploiting some loophole or by not using the project in the first place (So either way it's not especially detrimental to the original project to have them exist) http://www.stevestreeting.com/2009/09/15/my-evolving-view-of-open-source-licenses/ Anyways, We're getting pretty far away from the original topic here, Time for a new thread "Licensing Religious War: Bring your flamethrower"? ;) -- Open BlueDragon Public Mailing List http://www.openbluedragon.org/ http://twitter.com/OpenBlueDragon official manual: http://www.openbluedragon.org/manual/ Ready2Run CFML http://www.openbluedragon.org/openbdjam/ mailing list - http://groups.google.com/group/openbd?hl=en
