From: dan s. <dj...@wi...> - 2008-07-25 04:55:00
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On 24-Jul-08, at 1:25 PM, Vincent Torri wrote: >> i have to say now.. success in the open source world is utterly >> UNRELATED to >> what kind of open source license you use. it is a hindrance if you >> are not >> open. in fact GPL as a license for a library can be a hindrance. i >> could quote >> lots of examples - but i've been around these traps for a very long >> time now and >> license is neither here nor there. > > I've learned a lot about the licences reading these mails, and it > seems > that the fact is not "such licence is a hindrance" but "such licence > can > give us developpers". That's different. So, from what i've > understood, wrt > companies : > > 1) either with stay with BSD, and only the companies that accept to > work > with code licenced under BSD would eventually share code with us > > 2) either we switch to, for example LGPL, or other similar licence > (I was > told that MPL is not that bad), and then companies that accept to > share > code with LGPL AND BSD licenced code would eventually help us. The > difference can be great. > > So if we want to have more than 5 devs on the core efl, we should > seriously discuss about which licence to use. I don't think I'd attribute the license to our inability to grow the community. I'd more attribute it to the fact that everything is still in alpha. Stuff is constantly being re-written, re-created, re-started and re-done. It doesn't feel like we're getting _anywhere_. And that's from someone inside the community. How does that look to external developers? How do they know where to start when we've got multiple widget libraries, multiple data library formats, multiple everything. Which do they learn, which do they pick? We're constantly in the process of fracturing the community into smaller and smaller bits which then re-write the same code (often hitting all the same bugs and blocks the initial implementation had to work through). This can quickly lead to _both_ sets of developers getting burnt out and leaving. Who likes seeing all their hard work tossed aside and re-written? No, I don't think the license is the problem in terms of attracting independent developers. (I'm saying nothing of corporate developers as I don't know the inner workings of large corporations.) dan |