Re: [beepy-devel] FW: beepy

[Ivan R. J. <ju...@mc...>]

 > Hi Ivan,
> 
> I haven't been actively developing beepy for a while because 
> I don't have a direct personal need for it at the moment, and 
> the userbase has been pretty quiet about bugs or features. 
> That said, I'm happy to spend a bit of time improving it if 
> someone is using it and needs some work done on it.

Well, it's open source, if I need it fixed up, I can do it :-). Mostly, I
wanted to make sure the same functionality existed for BEEPy whether you
used twisted or not, and that it works on windows. These are pretty simple
tasks. Other than that I was considering building an application that used
BEEPy.
 
> beepy is LGPL, which is a pretty permissive license. What 
> aspects of the licensing are you finding problematic?

The only difference is the clause that requires that you provide sources for
the library if the user asks for them. But, in effect, to work with some
large entities on collaborations (private companies) they have taken the
stance that anything GPL or LGPL can't even be observed by their employees.
The lawyers toss it out before it gets to them. So on many of my projects,
where I work with these companies I have to use either BSD software or write
my own. Clearly, I don't want to write my own if it's already done.

The other argument would be that commercial adoption of the library usually
revolves around a "proprietary value add" to the library (something the
company did with/or to the library to make it valuable to customers). If
this is something they did to the library, the LGPL mandates they give away
what they consider their intellectual property. This hinders commercial
adoption significantly.

Anyhow, it's up to you, I'm not disagreeable about this, but I would like to
integrated BEEPy into a large project I'm doing that would require it to be
BSD.

Hope things are going well; I wasn't sure I could track you down after a
couple of years :-)

--Ivan
 
> I'm always open to persuasion, so feel free to plead your 
> case. Some active development would be good for beepy.
> 
> --
> Justin Warren <dae...@ei...>
>