On Thu, 2008-04-03 at 11:46 -0400, Jay R. Ashworth wrote: > Just curious why you look at it that way, Bret. > > The only reason I could see why someone would decline to contribute > to a GPLd project would seem to be handily dealt with merely by > dual-licensing your code GPL and BSD. >
You suggested that I release my code under a dual license including the gpl in response to me saying I wont release gpl. Uhh come on you can be more clever that that. I dont release gpl code anymore (since 1998) asking me to release gpl isnt going to make that happen. There are license problems that arise when you do dual license, for example the gpl cannot co-exist with anything else, when it is used with something else it takes over. So lets say that someone releases gpl/bsd dual license stuff. Ok, but what happens when someone wants to make it bsd only? You cant stop that, nor can you stop a gpl only variant (although that is easier to do, 1 line of gpl code causes 100M lines of non gpl code to magically become gpl). At the end of the day when you do a multi-license release you are effectively granting someone permission to pick the license that applies and will apply to privately maintained contributions, which further excludes the other license(s) from coming back. Case and point mozilla does a tri license, gpl,mpl and I believe bsd. Now the gpl and mpl are incompatible with each other. They cannot co-exist (by definition anything that does not let the gpl take over 100% is incompatible, anything that does let it take over is compatible). Now if I take the mozilla code, whichever one it may be, and use it with a mpl project (or add in stuff that is mpl compatible but gpl incompatible) how can the multi-license gpl part survive? The reality is that dual licensing may seem good on paper but when you actually look at what happens, you are giving people the right to choose the license that they like best. Now if asterisk were to do that I would contribute in a heart beat. But that isnt likely to happen. Of course that creates a licensing nightmare, using teh same mozilla tri-license example, if I contribute MPL only code then it cannot be allowed in any GPL release since the MPL only is GPL incompatible. Which means that all contributions have to be under all the licenses (or at least compatible). > On the other hand, it may be that you're complaining about *having to > assign your copyright to Digium*, which would be an entirely different > issue: you would be unhappy that they could then themselves dual-license > it commercially. > Is that the situation that troubles you? > no, did I say that was the situation that troubled me? I thought I was clear when I said that I do not release gpl stuff. And you dont assign copyright to digium anyway, you just give them full rights to use it however they see fit, you still retain copyright, and you still can do whatever you want with your code. If you assigned copyright to digium, you would have to ask their permission to use it, and that is not the case, further the copyright notices would only say digium and would not say the individual author if it were assigned. I never once even implied that this was the issue, so I dont know how you got to this point. So to be clear, yet again, I personally started refusing to contribute code to gpl released products in 1998. I personally do not release anything gpl or contribute code to gpl projects. It is a personal choice, it is one that I made after many contributions dating back to the early 90s. I will tell people specifically what is wrong, as I have done in the past with asterisk specifically as well as other programs, but I will not contribute any code as long as it is licensed gpl. My reasons for this is all the harm that the gpl causes to open source developers and how it makes it harder to be an open source developer. In short this is not the appropriate place to discuss how the gpl harms open source, so I will just close now. -- Trixter http://www.0xdecafbad.com Bret McDanel Belfast +44 28 9099 6461 US +1 516 687 5200 http://www.trxtel.com the phone company that pays you! _______________________________________________ --Bandwidth and Colocation Provided by http://www.api-digital.com-- asterisk-biz mailing list To UNSUBSCRIBE or update options visit: http://lists.digium.com/mailman/listinfo/asterisk-biz
