Re: [Embedlets-dev] License?

[Nicola K. B. <nic...@ap...>]

Andrzej Jan Taramina wrote, On 13/02/2003 18.31:
> Topic tags:[ARCH][JAPL][WIRING][DOCS][MGMT][STRATEGY][NEWBIE]
> _______________________________________________
> 
> OK...I'm hammering out some preliminary interfaces and base classes to get 
> us going.
> 
> But before I can really make any progress, we need to decide what kind of 
> license we want to release this stuff under:
> 
> Apache? 
> GPL?
> LGPL?
> Some other?

I'd like to chime in and post my 2c. I'm an Apache member, but also the 
founder of krysalis.org, that wants to start living soon with its own 
legal identity.

> So that the appropriate header comments will go in each source file, and the 
> correct license.txt file will be included.
> 
> The Apache license lets anyone do what they want, so long as they include 
> the license terms, copyright and acknowledgement to the embedlets.org 
> group...so it's pretty flexible.  I'm leaning towards this one.  

Yes, of course I like the Apache license. "Do what you want but give us 
credit, don't misuse our name, and don't sue us". It's real total 
freedom. It's the best license to make software used by all and become a 
reference.

> It would also be 
> nice to become an "official" Apache project some time down the road....lots of 
> benefits to going that route, and if we use the Apache license terms in the 
> beginning this would be easier.

Definately. Changing a license in case of individual contributors would 
require all to sign for the change. It becomes easily a mess. See 
below... [1]

> GPL is nice, but it forces all other implementations to be open source as well 
> (it's viral in that regard). 

The virality of GPL makes it difficult if not impossible to use for 
systems that want to become industry standards.

> LGPL is more for libraries than containers so 
> probably doesn't fit well.

And it doens't work well with Java. It defines "linking", which in Java 
is not present. At Apache it's not possible to put LGPL stuff in CVS, 
because we think it's as viral as GPL. We have asked clarifications to 
FSF but have not gotten them yet it seems.

> One issue is how to attribute the copyright since we don't have a legal entity 
> like the Apache Foundation or embedlets.org that can legally own the 
> copyright.

[1] From my experience I can say that making a legal entity that has the 
license is the best solution in this case. It makes it easy to change 
the license in the future or give away copyright, as for example would 
happen by donating code to Apache.

I am in the process of doing it for Krysalis for the same reason.

Anyway, I am also part of the Incubator PMC at Apache 
http://incubator.apache.org/ ... so if/when you will apply for Apache 
you will see me there too ;-)

 From what I see this is an excellent group, if you continue like this 
IMHO you will go far. My compliments :-)

-- 
Nicola Ken Barozzi                   nic...@ap...
             - verba volant, scripta manent -
    (discussions get forgotten, just code remains)
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