[Vacm-develop] Re: Relicensing of VACM components

[Mike S. <msn...@pl...>]

I hope the remaining vacm project developers (are there any?) take a very
strong stance against Tony's request to LGPL portions of vacm.  Reason
being; _all_ of VACM has been made available under the GPL for public
consumption and scrutiny, and as such many of us (much like Tony) have
been able to make use of this monitoring framework.  I realize that
ultimately Tony (and his company?) just want to protect the intellectual
property that is their proprietary hardware solution but asking for vacm
to be LGPL'd is like asking for any number of companies to use VACM for
their personal/commercial gain without helping contribute to the
intellectual property that gave them the ability to make use of libloose
et. al. in the first place; namely the intellectual property of those
developers who made VACM freely available (GPL'd) to the open source
community.

The VACM project, and any GPL'd project for that matter, should make every
attempt to encourage open standards in _both_ hardware and software.  If
some developer/company doesn't like this; tell them to go else where for a
solution!  If they have been able to engineer proprietary hardware that
needs to be so highly guarded by means of closed source solutions; then
they should have the know-how to be able to monitor their closed hardware
with closed software that originates from within their company!  

In short, you can't have your cake and eat it too.. and I hope others feel
the same way.

Mike


Tony Kavadias (to...@op...) said:

> Hi!
> 
> I would like to ask for your comments in LGPL'ing the following
> pieces of VACM:
> 
>   - libloose, the library used to interface loosely coupled VACM
>               modules to nexxus,
>   - libvacmclient, the library required by VACM clients to communicate
>               with nexxus.
> 
> Also, the following ought to be re-licensed to allow complete
> freedom in the use of the following code which would otherwise
> not serve its intended purpose:
> 
>   - skel, the sample code recommended for use with libloose in building
>               loosely coupled VACM modules.
> 
> The re-licensing of these components will help VACM:
> 
>   - be useful in the deployment of control solutions where the
>     components or devices that need to be controlled include the use
>     of 
> 
>   - be useful in the development of VACM clients, where these clients
>     may require the use of proprietary software, or allow people to
>     customize existing proprietary clients to allow them to become
>     VACM clients.
> 
> I would like to see VACM incorporate the use of the LGPL and/or
> some other open-source license that does not enforce you to apply
> that license to other code.  This is the very reason why I am seeing
> VACM become difficult to deploy on projects outside the open source
> development community.
> 
> I understand the GPL's role in providing free software to the computing
> community at large, but I find that VACM's licensing as it currently
> stands does not allow it to enter the environments which would other-
> wise make it useful for its intended purpose in hardware control and
> management.
> 
> I would like to see these licensing changes applied to VACM, and
> I hope that other developers see my point of view in extending the
> usefulness of VACM to areas that the GPL otherwise does not allow.
> 
> Thanks.
> 
> -- 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>     Tony Kavadias <to...@ma...>
> 
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