Re: [atlas-devel] ATLAS license discussion

[M. E. (E. B. <zn...@bo...>]

On Sun, Sep 4, 2011 at 2:09 PM, Clint Whaley <wh...@cs...> wrote:
> Guys,
>
> What about the Aristic License 2.0 (Perl 6 license):
>    http://www.opensource.org/licenses/Apache-2.0
>
> It looks like it has pretty much all the flexibility of BSD with at least
> slightly stronger patent langauge than Apache 2.0 (revokes your right to
> the code as well as the patents).
>
> It also specifically excludes linked code from coverage, to avoid the
> static/dynamic linking problem brought out by Brooks.
>
> At first it seems like it does something like LGPL in requiring the
> source to be given out, but AFAIK, it actually doesn't.  In the
> requirements for distribution (clause 4) it says you can do so
> if you meet any of a list of conditions, but one of those choices (4b)
> is simply that you don't name the package the same, and that you make
> sure the standard package can still be installed and used.
>
> Any comments?
> Clint

Only pragmatic ones - Perl 6 is not widely used and may never be,
given the overwhelming popularity of Perl 5.x, Python 2.x, Ruby 1.8.x,
PHP 4  and 5 and JavaScript. Perl 6 is an idea whose time has come and
gone. Python 3 may suffer the same fat e, Ruby 1.9 is on the edge and
I'm guessing there will never be a PHP 6.

The dynamics of open source projects depend on many things, but some
have grown and thrived with each of the common licenses. Others have
failed because nobody used them, the licenses have been too
restrictive, people failed to file their foundation paperwork, or
various anti-social behaviors in the community.

One thing that I think is common to *all* successful open source
projects is that they have strong corporate, academic or government
support of some kind. In short, I don't think the license question is
as important as how the community wants to be organized as a
collection of users and developers and how it wants to manage people,
computing equipment and money.
-- 
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"A mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems." -- Paul Erdős