On Tue, 2003-01-07 at 17:13, Tobias von Koch wrote: [...] > A possible solution to avoid something like this happening to future SA > code again is to change the license terms of SA. > > The LGPL, for example, would be a much better choice in my opinion. > > The LGPL would still permit commercial users, such as MessageLabs and > also NAI, to use the SA modules in their proprietary software. It would, > however, force them to contribute all the changes, improvements and > bugfixes back to the community project. This would of course apply only > to code which is written in future (not the current codebase).
Just this: there's a huge difference between honouring the terms of the LGPL (or the classical GPL, for that matter) and 'contributing changes to the community'. GCC is a good example. Apple is really contributing: they have hacked a lot on the Objective-C++ part, and now there's discussion going on how to get this into the main GCC sourcebase. [disclaimer: I never knew what came of this effort as I quit the job where I was involved with gcc.] A small embedded linux company I had to do with recently is the opposite: they also hacked gcc, but they didn't contribute the changes to the project. They followed the letter of the GPL: if you bought the devel kit with their gcc, you also got the full source. As a big tarball, without any documentation on what they'd done and why. Yes, in theory it is possible to diff the code and try to understand what they've done. In practice it's probably easier to rewrite the thing if someone ever needs the same functionality. [Said company doesn't exist anymore.] So, even changing the license doesn't change anything fundamental. If a company doesn't want to contribute to the community, it can just follow the license to the letter and still be all assholes. cheers -- vbi -- featured link: http://fortytwo.ch/gpg/subkeys
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
