On Tue, Aug 3, 2010 at 11:52 AM, Alexander Burger <a...@software-lab.de> wrote: > Thinking more about this, I must say that probably there isn't anything > which can be protected. > > What is PicoLisp? A collection of ideas, data structures, language > constructs, perhaps a programming philosophy. Nothing which you can > protect anyway. > > What is covered by these licenses is just the _code_. But the code of > PicoLisp is rather trivial. I re-implemented it so many times, and > anybody who likes could do the same without that we could stop him with > _any_ license. Am I wrong here?
I think that you're right. Part of what makes tinkering with PicoLisp fun for me is that its design is so simple that I can easily keep the whole thing "in my head," as it were. But that also means that it'd be pretty easy to clone, so the main thing that the GPL protects, IMHO, is merely the openness of your canonical PicoLisp implementation. But that will be open as long as you decide you want to keep it open. E.g., look at X.org, SQLite, Clang, or the BSDs themselves: all of them have BSD or MIT licenses, but their development is still fully in-the-open, and while I know there are uses of at least SQLite that would violate the GPL if it were so licensed, I don't feel as if they're in any way adversely affecting SQLite. If you make PicoLisp BSD, then its code isn't going anywhere or becoming any more closed unless you decide to take it that direction. What will happen is that it'll be a lot easier to use PicoLisp in commercial contexts, which could result in it being used much more widely. The trade-off is that improvements to PicoLisp made in those commercial contexts wouldn't necessary be submitted upstream to you. That's the trade-off--and whether the benefits are worth it is entirely up to you. --Benjamin -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picol...@software-lab.de?subject=unsubscribe
