Re: [xmlvm-users] Licence issues

[Panayotis K. <pan...@pa...>]

On 03 Οκτ 2009, at 7:21 μ.μ., Wolfgang Korn wrote:

> We carefully decided to put our project under GPL. And there have
> already been some discussions on the mailing list concerning this  
> topic.
>
> Usually people are having problems with the GPL if they want to build
> software which is not open source - mostly because they want to do
> commercial apps and want to make money out of it. There is nothing  
> wrong
> with writing commercial apps based on open source tools. But our point
> of view is, that in such a case something has to be given back to the
> open source community. In our case we want to be given something back
> which helps us to further improve our project. This can be monetary
> funding or hardware sponsoring as well as providing a significant
> contribution to the project. In turn we provide something called a
> linking exception, which allows you to use XMLVM without putting your
> project under GPL as well.
>
> -- Wolfgang

Yes, I understand your point of view.
I am too an open source developer and I have experienced more than  
once the situation you are describing.
I was even offered some kind of "payment" to implement a couple of  
commercial features, which (payment) was retracted later on (and I was  
really pissed off).

Still, I don't feel comfortable to use at the heart of my (possible  
future) application something that is not, at the end of the day, as  
free as it sounds.
There is not any (popular) open source library (not to mention part of  
a build tool-chain) that is still under the restrictive GPL License.
Please let me remind you QT (and of course KDE), and how many  
developers left this camp to ride the Gnome/GTK wagon -- even when  
TrollTech decided to give it under a dual license, it was already too  
late.

Of course, giving back to the community is something that I not only  
vote for, but it's also something I try to do it (and persuade others  
to do it) as much as I can.
That's why I talked about LGPL which exactly ensures that.

I know that the core code of this project belongs to you (as a group),  
and you can do whatever you want with it. But, believe me, I am  
looking at the whole situation with great skepticism and  I have the  
feeling that there a lot of people like me.
I just can't trust an alpha/beta open source project which does not  
provide any warranty (it's GPL, right?), only because my favorite  
language is Java (with Obj-C being my second choice).

You project sounds really promising, but it's really not known at all.  
I strongly believe that you'll give a great boost on your project if  
only you have a more friendly license even from commercial  
applications. Just imagine the history of Linux, if GCC and it's  
products and libraries were stuck to GPL.