RE: [Opencxx-users] Re: [Synopsis-devel] constant expression analyzer and 'sizeof' and the recent license discussion

[<da...@te...>]

Hi Stefan,
The topic is not dead. It is beaten to death. The discussion 'which license
is better for the open source world' and 'should open source support
development of commercial software and closed source products' has VERY long
history. There are several opinions and this is mine:

Open source should support commercial software, closed software based on
open source projects. Why? Beacause it helps every programmer, every
software professional starting or joining small company, which has limited
(or literally none) resources. The professional can use the open source
products like: STL, boost (tokenizing, parsing, serializing,
dynamic-languages interface-to Python, C++ aids, math aids, graphs
operations, fast matrix operations, etc, etc), lua (the best, the easies to
integrate scripting language). Using it he jumps in no time into the so
called market. And here is the really important thing. The market.
In most cases, so called market is simply doing some additional work for
some particular client, one. The small company or even a loose group of
cooperating coders CAN NOT give the client the source code. I will say it
again: NO GIVING AWAY THE SOURCE CODE. Why? Because in that case the client
will gladly take another company and blackmail the original authors and make
them work for low price or (which is the case in eastern Europe) takes his
nephew or his friend who claims to code and has no job currently.

The client takes the code, and says: and now you will be my slave or I dump
you and take some other guys. 
Or: ok, you did good job, you did the hard part, but my nephew can code
either and he will get the rest of the contract, not you.

All of the ideas, all the most important work (which is interacting with
user, optimizing operations) which takes long and should give the authors
BIG advantage over the competitors is just gone. 

Ok, you will say that LGPL allows you to incorporate open source using
binaries. Here it is why it is not good:
1. Often you cannot do it that easly, or even VERY hard technically - there
are SO many examples, everyone can imagine at leas a few - I will say just
that it concerns mostly customizing open source products (like incorporating
OpenC++ into commercial editor, or giving additional features on clients
request)

2. The LGPL license is just HORRIBLE, no one can tell if particular use of
the product is legal or not - you cannot even trust a lawyer, because there
are only a few lawyers that specialize themselves in the subject (and they
are EXPENSIVE !!).

In the opposite, look at the OpenC++ licens which Grzegorz posted on the
list. It is SO simple that every manager will understand in 5 silly
minutes!! I cannot tell enough how important it is. 
Simply said: when the boss sees the LGPL license in the Synopsis readme, he
will say: get this out of my sight FAST, aaargh... 

And when he sees the OpenC++ Core license: cute thing, yes we need to do
some work to use it as we want, but we can own the code, and the competition
does not have it. And when we make the next step then we will post the code
to Grzegorz or support his team with a donation if we got succeeded.

Now some examples of great open source products allowing incorporating into
closed source products.
SGI STL - no comment: it is the fundament of C++ today
Boost- it is so big that it sould be here repeated 20 times 
Boost
Boost

OpenC++ - which I think will gain BIG attention after adding some more
features, liberal license will make it happen quicker (in my opinion)
Lua - www.lua.org, this is my favorite project :)
wxWidgets - my second favorite - "The wxWidgets 2 licence is essentially the

    L-GPL (Library General Public Licence), with an exception stating that 
    derived works in binary form may be distributed on the user's own terms"
quote from www.wxwidgets.org/newlicen.htm

I wish all of you who support the OpenC++ project best luck. I truly believe
that OpenC++Core will be major addition in the C++ world.

Best regards
Nick Dawidowski


-----Original Message-----
From: ope...@li...
[mailto:ope...@li...] On Behalf Of Stefan
Seefeld
Sent: Wednesday, October 13, 2004 8:09 PM
To: 'Grzegorz Jakacki'; 'syn...@fr...'
Cc: ope...@li...
Subject: RE: [Opencxx-users] Re: [Synopsis-devel] constant expression
analyzer and 'sizeof'

Hey Grzegorz,

> From: Grzegorz Jakacki [mailto:ja...@ac...]
> Sent: October 12, 2004 07:12

> Pls. google for the answer, this subject has been beaten to 
> death many 
> times on different fora and seems to be religious issue, no point in 
> bringing it here.

The topic doesn't appear to be as dead as you make it sound
(as this very thread proves). May I remind you that you were the one
bringing the topic up, so all people are asking now is why you insist
on not wanting to use LGPL.
It seems clear that *the* answer doesn't exist (not on google by any
means), so the point of the question as I interpret it was about
what your reasons are to refuse it.
By the way, you asked for comments on potential licenses for future
OpenCxx versions about a month ago. Was there any follow-up ?

Regards,
		Stefan


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