Re: Plans for next release?

On Fri, 2004-08-06 at 09:17 -0400, Michael C. Neel wrote:
> We are going with the BSD, the newer version.  The no endorsement clause
> is important to the powers that be, which is understandable.  Plus, this
> is the license of Albatross, which must be maintained as well, and
> solves any possible license conflict issues.

Excellent; this will certainly allow code to be shared freely among the
participants.

> Since we are a company that mixes closed and open source code in a
> project, I am not a fan of using the GPL.  I do not think it's needed to
> have a clause to require modification to be provided back in source.
[...]

In this case, I agree with you. With the GPL, you can always license the
code with completely different license for a particular customer --
provided you have copyright on all the code in question. Since this is
not the case for Albatross, BSD seems like a good choice.

> In general I like the BSD license because it protects the developers and
> gives freedom to users, where as the the GPL places requirments upon the
> users.

I do believe that freedom cannot exist without requiring responsibility.
The GPL incorporates that requirement into the license, while the BSD
license trusts everyone to have that responsibility anyway. In that
sense, the BSD license is quite idealistic -- which is commendable.

Well, I'm happy to say that we have exchanged more than two emails
discussing this, without having included a single personal insult! That
seems to be rare these days ;)

> We are fedora people here, so we can't cope with anything debian.  J/K
> =p.

Nevertheless, any improvements coming from my Debian work will be
offered to you, so that at least you'll have to cope with ;)

> It might be a week before we get the project going (legal can be
> slow to read two paragraphs, lol), but we've used SF in the past so
> we'll probably be lazy and just use it now.

That's good. However, I'm a little surprised and worried about the fact
that the Object Craft people haven't participated more in this
discussion. After all, if Object Craft decides not to join in on the SF
project, we are talking about a fork here.

-- 
Fabian Fagerholm <[email protected]>

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