RE: [binarycloud-dev] LGPL

[John D. <jo...@we...>]

On Thu, 14 Jun 2001, Peter Bowyer wrote:

> At 02:40 PM 6/14/01 -0400, you wrote:
<<snip>>
> 
> It is the forking part that I really don't like, and I believe it is 
> harming the community rather than helping it.  Look at Linux or PHP-Nuke 
> for an example.  If everyone had worked together on either of those 
> products rather than developing their own version, they would be much 
> further on.
> 

I don't think you can paint with such a broad brush. gcc/egcs is a case where
forking resulted in a better end product. emacs/xemacs is a famous case where
the two projects continued on their seperate paths, but both have loyal user
bases, so the community was still well-served.

> For this reason I have never released my code under an open source 
> license.  In fact my code isn't licensed at all, which is worse, but I 
> haven't found a license I like and/or understand yet :-)
> 

I'm not sure anyone fully understands the licenses ;)

<<snip>>
> 
> People are not all programming for nothing (as thankfully Alex seems to be 
> doing with Binarycloud) - I personally would like to see licenses which 
> make the product free for personal use, and cost $$ for business use, 
> become more accepted on the internet.  That way I could fund my way through 
> University by selling <promote> sendcard <http://www.sendcard.f2s.com> 
> </promote> :-)
> </soapbox>
> 

Another option is (L)GPL'ing the development/bleeding-edge version, and having
a BSD-licensed version lag behind. MySQL does (or at least used to do)
something like this, although with completely opposite goals. This encourages
contribution more than a defacto dual license, especially as long as
binarycloud's feature list is rapidly growing. 

-- 

John Donagher

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