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Re: Working on new installer / makeinstall... [message #29125 is a reply to message #29121]

Wed, 06 October 2010 15:03

Rishi
Messages: 39
Registered: August 2010
Location: Trincomalee, Sri Lanka

Member

Can we make U++ GPL incompatible (for direct modification)? We don't need advertising clause--Future GPL may support Adv. clauses.

GPL will ruin our plans.
All we have to do is publicly saying that derivatives can't be GPL but you can link GPL apps into it.

We don't have to allow one-way road--Better to close it. Very Happy

We are allowing GPL, but GPL doesn't allow code to be put on looser licenses. That is the only fault we did. The GPL will end Proprietary and everything - It also ends Open Spirit. If MS die, can you expect a better 'Linux/UNIX'?
They have been the best competitors. But one thing I can Say is -- If your project is taken over by LGPL by someone, The project will go w/o traces (like X11 and Xlib).::(:.

Can you imagine a world w/o proprietary?
People are becoming selfish.
We have to put the copy-left world to end -- in which everyone is selfish and jealous About others.
We don't need the 'advertising clause' for it -- later GPL and LGPL may allow advertising clause:(.
We have to publicly say that we don't allow copy-left direct modification in the license.

Quote:

Real Freedom is Worth much more than ~$300 million
Consider the value of the Apache HTTPD server. If you developed a method to quantify the economic impact of a given technology, Apache HTTPD would probably rank as the most economically significant open source product to date (other than sendmail or bind). Although impossible to accurately measure, the commercial impact of HTTPD is immense - I�d venture that if one were to put a monetary value on the technology that runs 2/3 of the web you�d end up with a figure in the hundreds of billions possibly more. This figure would not only factor in the value of the technology itself, but the value of the commercial ecosystem built atop it - services and products. Chances are high that the majority of people reading this blog entry have in some form or another profited from the work of the HTTPD server project. The key difference between the economic impact of a product like HTTPD and the economic impact of a product like JBoss is that the immense economic benefits of HTTPD haven�t been consolidated in one single corporate entity. This is due in no small part to the Apache Software License. �Free to take, free to change, free to distribute (just tell people where you got it from)�
So, calll me an idealist, but I�d much rather that the fruits of my own open-source �labor� be distributed widely. I�d much prefer to work on an Apache-licensed project with heavy involvement from IBM than a GPL-licensed project owned by Red Hat. Even if IBM is going to take my effort and resell it to many, I�m confident that I have the same rights for code that they contribute. In an Apache licensed project, there is a level playing field, there is an open ecosystem. Geronimo can welcome the participation of individuals and corporations like Virtuas alike, they all have equal right to benefit from the intellectual property developed - there are no second class citizens. I (or you) could take the Maven or Geronimo codebase tomorrow, customize it and sell it to some corporation for thousands of dollars without distributing source of my customizations - the FSF sees that as a bad thing, I see it as encouraging participation and allowing people to create a sustainable commercial �ecosystem� around open-source.
What causes the most damage? When a community is mediated by a single corporate commercial entity, you fail to attract those with casual, but valuable interest, and you end up creating a top-down corporate structure. Open communities like the Apache Software Foundation serve as a sort of neutral referee, they can more easily scale to meet market demand and keep up with the pace of innovation. This is not to say that open source foundations are perfect, the Apache Software Foundation itself tends to get bogged down in the governance process, but at least this process isn�t driven by the commercial interests of a single contributor. And the rules of Apache prevent a single commercial interest from gaining a controlling �share� of a particular PMC. In my view, the ASF exists to encourage open communities, and, IMO, the license is central to that effort.
An alternative reality: the GPL�d Apache HTTPD server
Imagine if there was a single company in 1996 that funded HTTPD development and licensed it under a reciprocal license like GPL. I�m certain that this project wouldn�t have seen the level of corporate and individual participation it has seen over the last ten years. A company like IBM probably would have balked at extending and enhancing such a system knowing that such altruism was simply subsidizing the operations of the controlling corporate organization. You wouldn�t have seen a whole constellation of commercial interests attracted to the development effort, you probably wouldn�t have seen the large number of books printed on the subject. When a company controls the community, you also tend to expect them to take care of the documentation.
If such a company had existed and the httpd server community was �owned� by a single corporate entity, I know what would have happened to that corporation in early 1997, They would have been purchased by Microsoft, and this would have affected the Linux adoption curve as well. If Apache HTTPD had been purchased by Microsoft in 1997, we�d be working in a dramatically different environment. Microsoft would have not only had a monopoly on the browser, they would have had a monopoly on the server-side as well. Java would have been dead on arrival. Technologies like Rails or PHP would have to go through the central mediator that is Redmond. We�d all be paying a lot more for software, and Microsoft would have brought httpd development to a close.
All of these GPL plays will fall off the radar one by one, InnoDB purchased by Oracle. MySQL will eventually be acquired, etc. These companies are buying these products because they want to be the original copyright owner and they want to eventually dual-license, extend and sell commercial licenses. This isn�t scare tactics as much as it is my fear that corporate / GPL / open-source strategies point toward consolidation and we�re not better for it.

Source

Some people are shy to say that they disallow copy-left and they put alternative barriers to copy-left. (Apache, BSD). We can't trust GPL-- Some day it will allow the 'Alternative methods' mentioned

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