Matthias,
I am new to this list, so you can ignore me as you like, but I have been around this industry for a very long time. I have discussed this topic and how it relates to Forth all too often, but in the end, it really doesn't matter what you and I think, or who is on the “right” side of the law. You are correct that there have been many cases where GPL has won, but after all the lawyers have been paid, it's the customer who has lost. This is NOT a battle you want to play, and in the end, no one can win. You are only one of 3 alternatives in the Forth market for AVR: http://www.offete.com/328eForth.html and http://www.forth.com/downloads/SwiftX-Eval-AVR-3.7.1-f4qbm8hnnrg5r42ko.exe Are both viable alternatives. I'm working on a project for Maker Faire right now that I hope will run on all 3, although I only have eForth working at the moment. I hope to make it public domain, but your words might end up making me not want to even mention your product. While it is not difficult to be compatible across multiple versions of Forth, it is exceedingly difficult to take any of us to court, since only a very few have ever made anything off the language itself. It would also not be very difficult to produce a closed system that would be extremely difficult to tell was using yours or anyone else’s Forth. They are just libraries, and it's doesn't take much to obfuscate them enough so they are no longer recognizable. Been there, done that! Now, as far as removing the heads from the executable object, I would highly recommend that Enoch look at the SwiftX model. It does that from the start, and as someone who has worked at Forth, Inc., I highly recommend their tethered model rather than those that have to support a built in compiler model, like yours and eForth. I also did my own separate head model back in the 80's from a polyForth or F83 model (;I really can't remember which anymore;). I really liked the idea of being able to remove the heads once I finished the project. I never actually did anything with it because Forth, Inc. hired me shortly after that, but it was certainly a fun learning project. People said it couldn't be done back then too, so be careful what you say is impossible. You are about to loose a customer! DaR From: Sam Putman Sent: Monday, February 17, 2014 12:20 PM To: Everything around amforth On Mon, Feb 17, 2014 at 11:52 AM, Matthias Trute <mtr...@web.de> wrote: > Hi Sam, > I am concerned about part of what you appear to be implying here. Do you > > consider Forth words loaded into the AmForth environment to constitute > > 'derived works', and hence subject to the GPL? > > Definitely. Any program includes the amforth system (GPL'ed). So it is > a derived work (amforth is not *L*GPL). But IANAL... > > > That would make me uncomfortable, as someone who favors the public domain > > and BSD/MIT style permissive licenses for my own work. > > I'll never understand the *BSD people. They give away their work for > free and could not even pay the energy bill for their development > systems (happened just recently in Canada). *I* value my work much > higher, and I've expressed earlier how I see my payment: Code, Success > stories and cooperation/acknowledgement. I do understand, that others > have different goals in mind, but such are the rules. (I considered the > Affero-GPL, it would be nice too). > > I'd say that a man-year of work went into amforth by now, so feel > free to start your own forth. With a more permissive license, if you > like. It's doable and it's fun. And a lot of work. And up to you. > > Hmm, y'know, I just might. But certainly not to spite your good work or detract from it. I'm no good spokesperson for those who designed the permissive licenses. For me, it comes down to the presumption of goodwill, which I am willing to make in my own work. I'm old enough to have seen a few iterations of this discussion, and harbor no hostility to either camp. By the same token. If I distribute a file which runs only on AmForth, under only a permissive license, I don't see where the GPL affects it. If someone else wanted to port it to eForth, for example, and sell the resulting product (a washing machine, right? ;-), any claims that loading it into AmForth contaminates the original code license would be on shaky ground. I hope this is not the case that would make you mad, rather, someone writing a 'proprietary' extension to AmForth and distributing it in an image-only fashion or as firmware. IANAL, but I do know the consensus on this one, and it favors your interpretation. Irrelevant to my purposes, happily. As a total aside, supporting Dr. Ting if you need a proprietary Forth might be a good idea. I'd hate to see either Matthias or Enoch's customers be unhappy. cheers, -Sam. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. Read the Whitepaper. http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=121054471&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Amforth-devel mailing list for http://amforth.sf.net/ Amforth-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/amforth-devel ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Managing the Performance of Cloud-Based Applications Take advantage of what the Cloud has to offer - Avoid Common Pitfalls. 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