At 05:40 PM 11/21/2001, Steven Pitchford wrote:
>Hi,
>
>The other aspect of this is what will actually be created.
>I'd rather see a reference model created, and leave it to others to
>improve the speed and such. I think sun have done something
>similar with J2EE.
>
>It means that the people here can focus on getting the feature set
>right, and leave it to others to do optimisations and such, but will
>no doubt have an effect on the legal aspects of the project.
>
>Does any one have experience in this sort of field?
With our own company, we GPL what we open source precisely because we own
the copyright and can selectively free up the source for those that want
commercial license. GPL is definitely kind of like a "virus" as Microsoft
says which protects open source much more aggressively than a BSD style or
Perl artistic license.
I don't think copyright will really be a problem if the P5EE components use
the Perl license because it's so liberal that there is little need to come
up with a more liberal license for commercial use. After all, when I upload
to CPAN am I transferring the copyright to CPAN? I don't think so. But I
think few commercial entities complain about using CPAN at all, whereas I
hear a lot of complaints about GPL (to which I respond -- if its our
software they are complaining about the license for -- then pay us for a
less restrictive license!) ...
This is identical to an interview I read a few weeks ago with SleepyCat
(the Berkeley DB folks)... As a company, it's in our best interest to use
an overly aggressive open source
license that forces commercial entities to buy a less restrictive one. As
an open source group though who is building a project precisely intended to
be used in commercial large scale products, then we want a less restrictive
license and I would argue against GPL.
If we stick to a liberal license that allows anyone else to take up the
code and run with it if the originator close sources the rest, I think
transferring copyright to YAS is unnecessary burden on YAS. To me P5EE is
a construct that is like a more structured CPAN, so the same old licenses
that are prevalent on CPAN should work fine for this project.
Is there anyone in YAS reading this list who may have an opinion?
Later,
Gunther
