Re: [xmlvm-users] Licence issues

[Arno P. <ar...@pu...>]

Guys,

I have been offline for a few days and I'm catching up on my email. I 
want to add my opinion to this discussion. Actually, I just wanted to 
clarify a few things. Most of it has been said before, but I still feel 
like writing this message.

XMLVM is an Open Source project that is licensed under the GPL. The GPL 
license is used by 70% of all projects that are hosted at SourceForge. 
There are prominent libraries (e.g., readline) that also use GPL, so 
XMLVM is no exception. As a side note: Gnome was created because Qt was 
initially only available under a commercial license; not because Qt used 
GPL. Since XMLVM is Open Source, it will ALWAYS be Open Source. Even if 
the core team gets run over by a truck tomorrow, the latest version of 
XMLVM will still be available. So, I don't understand when one of you 
was musing if it is worthwhile to invest in XMLVM.

The way I look at it is that the discussion is not about GPL, but if you 
can get someone else's work for free to use it for your commercial 
ventures. If you only had altruistic motives and only were interested in 
contributing to an Open Source project, we would not have this 
discussion. You can already do this right now! As someone else pointed 
out, GPL does not prohibit commercial products; except that you have to 
give away your source code as well. The reason there is this discussion 
because some users of XMLVM want to make money with the applications 
they make AND keep their own source code proprietary. As Wolfgang 
pointed out earlier, that is absolutely OK! But to those people I would 
respond: are we (the XMLVM core team) not also entitled to have 
commercial interests? That is why we came up with the linking exception 
rule: if you make a "contribution" to XMLVM, you will get a linking 
exception.

Of course you are free to start your own Open Source project with a more 
permissive license (forking XMLVM would not work because the fork will 
also have to be under GPL as well), but as Kevin pointed out, why not 
contribute to XMLVM and we'll give you a linking exception that will 
allow you to use XMLVM in your commercial product? We understand that 
there is no clear definition of "contribution" at this point. But rest 
assured that we are interested in XMLVM to succeed. I am sure that if 
you want to use XMLVM for a commercial product, we will find some common 
ground. We have already issued several of these linking exceptions to 
contributors.

I would recommend you guys read this article that was previously linked 
from /.:
http://zedshaw.com/blog/2009-07-13.html

I don't approve his language, but I certainly share his sentiments.

Arno