First of all I want to thank you, Kirill, it was great to enjoy your support. You are certainly one of the most constructive persons I know.
I think the problem is quite fundamental. Many developers are investing quite a lot in an open source project, and they don't want others to modify it without profiting from their modification. This point I perfectly valid. Given that sympy would be picked up by an company and they would turn it into a closed source mathematica2, some sympy probably developers would say: "Great, this draws much attention to our open source project, and we will profit from the research they will do, because we can see how they solved problems, even if they don't share their code with us. And after all, it's better they invest in this area without sharing code than not investing anything (due to restrictive licenses)." For this kind of developers, the BSD license is better, because they think it's better for the project and the code in their opinion. But others would mention: "I want my project to be open, closed source is completely useless for me. I spent my work to let others share, not that someone grabs it to make money with it without giving anything back to the community. Freedom is one of the most important things about our project, and this company is destroying freedom. Because they have more resources they will have a more polished product and drawing off our users and contributors. It's ok if they use it to earn money, but they have to give something back" These opinions are quite polarized and are probably not well formulated by me. Mainly I want to say that both opinions are equally right. It's up to everyone to decide which license and use of his very work pleases him most and to respect the decisions and motivations of developers preferring other licenses. You can't make both groups happy. An example for such an scenario is Wine. They switched from MIT to LGPL due to a company not contributing changes back to the core project. I would count myself to the first group (I wouldn't mind if a company would do such things to sympy), but I comprehend very well others like Kirill who do not want this. > "make private modifications to sympy and keep them secret." If I understand the GPL correctly, it won't prevent this. It does not force you to give modifications back. It only forces you to distribute your program with sources. This means they can keep modifications private as long as they don't sell the software. And this practically means that modifications won't be secret of course. :) I don't like that GPL is so viral. It's often incompatible to other open source licenses. But it's a great choice if you want to to avoid these "private and secret modifications". Vinzent --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "sympy" group. To post to this group, send email to sympy@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sympy?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
