The only thing larger that nerd's head is his ego
-----Original Message-----
From: Per Bothner [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Friday, April 04, 2003 10:47 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Support for XQuery
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/
