[Nevin comments on the proposed GNU-ification of Unicon] > Without knowing the reasons why, it makes it hard to comment. > Is this being done to give it a distribution channel? I'm all for this...
This is the main advantage in my view, others might have different reasons. > Is this being done to protect Unicon from commercial interests? No, I agree with you that we are not in need of protection. When we went GPL in the first place, it was more a promise that we wouldn't hide the source if we did a commercial version, than a guard against others taking our stuff and trying to sell it. > The work that Unicon is based on is public domain. It doesn't seem > right to me to put that work under a more restrictive license. As Shamim notes, we aren't restricting the Icon code at all, it is in the public domain and we don't have any jurisdiction over it, the GPL only applies to our changes. At the time we went to source forge, "public domain" was not listed as an option for our project, and after discussion of going with a BSD-type license we selected the GPL. We have a standing offer to Icon Project that any portions of Unicon they wish to adopt are "freed" from the GPL and put into the public domain. I don't think they plan to take us up on that offer, at least not in a big way. :-) [Shamim quoted Marc Espie as writing:] > I will admit that the move of Unicon from Public Domain to GPL is > one major reason I don't contribute much (in fact, not at all > recently) to it. Its a bummer that some people are so anti-FSF that using the GPL causes rejection of the language. Such people don't understand the benefits of the GPL and/or falsely think it impairs their ability to use the language in commercial ways. Many many commercial applications are shipped in binary form that were built using GPL'ed languages, so I am really not sure I understand the objection, but so be it. Further affiliation with FSF does not do (much) additional damage, and may possibly increase our visibility and the number of OS distributions that include Unicon in them. Clint [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.NET email is sponsored by: SourceForge Enterprise Edition + IBM + LinuxWorld = Something 2 See! http://www.vasoftware.com _______________________________________________ Unicon-group mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/unicon-group
