Re: licensing

On Fri, Oct 17, 2003 at 09:21:44AM +0200, aslam wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> We in the South African government OSS workgroup have been discussing the adoption of an open source license for software the government creates. The GPL and BSD licenses have feautured the most in our discussions. It is appreciated that some projects might need special consideration in terms of licensing however we would like to recommend a default license for Government all things being equal. What does the list think ?

Hi Aslam - please format your lines to 65 chars long (RFC-1855)
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1855.html
There is a setting in your outlook options for this.

RE: your question: 

Use GPL. BSD allows other parties to take the software private, and not
share their changes. This enables parties like Microsoft to "embrace
and extend" existing API's and standards creating a proprietary lock-in
where none existed before.

GPL prevents that from happening.

Real world experience shows us that GPL style licenses are much more
successful than BSD licenses at producing large, successful communities
of both developers and end-user's. For a project to succeed, both are
needed.

As for "some projects might need special consideration in terms of
licensing" : Depending on how you delineate the boundaries of what
"a project" is, its unlikely that a project should need special
considerations in licensing. "A Project" is not "software". "A project"
is an effort to produce (implement and install) a specific set of
capabilities to meet a specific set of needs.

While any government security function probably has data they need to
keep secret (I certainly hope they do!), the generalized software tools
used to manipulate that data, like databases should be based on GPL
software.

Granted - There may be some narrowly focused applications which might
be built on top of a database system that a government needs to keep
private but these should be implemented entirely in-house and have no
need to be based on GPL'd software. These however do not fall into
the scope of "Generalized software tools" and its unlikely that any
GPL'd software exists for these functions so your gov't would likely be
writing it from scratch anyway.

-- 
Jeff Kinz, Open-PC, Emergent Research,  Hudson, MA.  [email protected]
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