On Tue, Nov 30, 2010 at 12:00 PM, Josh Hayes-Sheen <[email protected]>wrote:
> > 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, Not sure I see how a specific license promotes or doesn't promote the best code quality. 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) > I still think if you only look at licenses from the standpoint of the developers and not from that of the end users it only gives you half the picture, and not even the important half. > > Steve Streeting did a pretty good explanation of why, in his > experience, it was more practical to just use MIT Licensing. This is kind of the crux of the matter. "Practical" isn't always "right" depending on the philosophy to which you subscribe. > 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. But here again I think you're only looking at it from the development side. >From the standpoint of the user, and to get really far afield from the standpoint of society as a whole since so much of society runs on software these days, it's "better" to guarantee open access top to bottom IMO. Look at what Apple's doing recently, the potential mess Oracle is making of Java, what Oracle's doing with most of Sun's open source offerings (Open Solaris, OpenOffice.org, etc.) and we can see what a danger things like software patents and "walled gardens" are to the rights of the users, not to mention innovation in general. Great short movie about software patents, by the way: http://patentabsurdity.com/ If everyone were altruistic then maybe it wouldn't matter, and in my experience in the IT world most *individuals* in this business are pretty altruistic. But there are way to many commercial interests at the corporate level, where companies are always looking to get something for nothing and make a huge profit from it, for us to depend on the forces involved all being nice and doing the right thing (whatever your definition of "right" may be). Again using Oracle as an example since they've been in the press so much recently, they're pretty much doing everything wrong that they possibly can from the standpoint of the communities that built up around Sun's open source projects, because they clearly don't care about things at that level. Whether they should or not I suppose is up for debate (i.e. is a company's only purpose to make money for shareholders, and to hell with everything else?), though I can't imagine pissing off the people who helped build the things from which you want to make money is a good long-term business strategy. > Anyways, We're getting pretty far away from the original topic here, > Time for a new thread "Licensing Religious War: Bring your > flamethrower"? ;) > Yep, this topic always gets pretty contentious because there's such valid rationale on both sides. Again, the goal of your project and what you do or don't want to protect will more or less dictate the type of license you choose. There's merits and downsides to both philosophies, and any time you get into an argument over "practical" vs. "greater good" things are never cut and dry. -- Matthew Woodward [email protected] http://blog.mattwoodward.com identi.ca / Twitter: @mpwoodward Please do not send me proprietary file formats such as Word, PowerPoint, etc. as attachments. http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html -- 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
