Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
Their point was to disallow software from becoming proprietary, yet this
license is actually used as a trojan horse by people that (in full
right!) want to have a commercial return from their effort.
Trojan horse implies something sneaky and underhanded.
So i find
pretty funny the fact that it's not difficult to produce proprietary
software with a foundation on a GPL base: as long as you want to pay for
it you can easily forget about the GPL philosophy.
But I'm not using the GPL "as a foundation"; I'm offering an
alternative. (On the other hand, using the GPL rather than a
more permissive license may encourage companies to pay
for that alternative. So far only one company has, but others
have expressed interest - mostly before the economy turned sour.)
From a social point of view this is interesting: most BSD guys, like
me, have a strong belief on Open Source as a gift to humanity at large
(a gift is a gift: no strings attached), and have a deeper trust on the
human society since we believe that our efforts might be economically
recognized by people (and companies) with good will and good faith.
Companies might hire you to work on BSD software, but they do that
with GPL sofwtare as well. It's a pragmatic but unanswered question
as to which will "improve the world" more. There is no evidence
to support the belief that the GPL is detrimental to that goal,
so I have to consider a secondary question as well: which is more
likely to improve my own financial well-being. (I have expensive
mortgages to pay. I can't afford to be too charitable with my
most precious commodity - my time.)
The point is different: we have to make sure that ASF code depending on
the Kawa library will not automatically become GPL. This is what happens
with all GPL (or GPL variations) that I know of, but it will be
interesting to see if this applies to your modification in particular.
The only danger is you let someone check-in a modification to
Kawa that I have not approved, since then you're no longer
in the "no modifications" case. That shouldn't be too difficult
to avoid.
Also, the virality of GPL is recursive so if Kawa (as a java
application) relies on GPL code, then it's automatically GPL, no matter
how you label it: this is something that needs investigation too.
Well, I've tried very hard to be very contientious about licenses
for any code I incorporate.
Anyway, I'm glad we've cleared up soem misunderstandings,
and appriate you looking into the issue.
--
--Per Bothner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://per.bothner.com/
