On Sun, 7 Aug 2005, Kyle Wheeler wrote: > On Friday, August 5 at 10:22 PM, quoth Andreas Aardal Hanssen: >> I'm looking for an appropriate license for Binc IMAP in the future. > This begs the question: "what's wrong with the current license?" I don't > feel that there's anything wrong with the current license, so I'd vote > for not changing it --- but if there's a concern with it, let's address > it. Why are you considering changing it?
Hi, Kyle. No need to worry; I'm just opening up the topic for discussion. So far it seems perfectly fine for me to stick with GPL, for many reasons. >> 1) It's open source, for all that means. > Cool, so... any from the official list will work: > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/ >> 2) I want to encourage everyone to send their patches back to the >> community, so that others in the same position as you can make use of your >> adaptations. > Unfortunately, where licences are concerned, there's "requiring" > modifications to be made public and there's not requiring. "Encouraging" > doesn't really mean much, as far as licenses go. Well there's lawyer talk and there's common tongue, and as long as our noses aren't stuck between words between ยง paragraphs, I'd like to keep things in human readable form ;-). But I agree of course; if a license would encourage something, and not require it, then that paragraph is usually superfluous. Almost like the definition of SHOULD in well-known RFCs.. >> 3) I want the business world to feel good about using and modifying Binc >> IMAP. > This, I'm guessing, is why you decided to re-evaluate the issue. Why > would a business not feel good about using or modifying BincIMAP > currently? Are any modifications okay for any purpose, or do you want to > require those modifications to be available to the community? May a > company sell modified BincIMAP binaries (say, as part of an embedded > webmail turnkey-device, for example)? Of course they can; but they must provide the source code for it. And if someone who has obtained a binary asks them for the source, they must provide it. I would claim the reason many companies are afraid of the GPL is that they don't know the license. They only read headlines of diverse GPL-unfriendly articles ;-), and share nosense during lunch breaks. Sharing the source code of something that is already open source is, of course, not a competitive advantage. But with the GPL, companies can not create a proprietary back-end without sharing the source. And I am pretty sure that Google, for example, wouldn't want to share details about their back-end with the OS community. >> 4) I don't want the existing Binc IMAP community (yeah, you!) to feel that >> any new license is of hindrance for them to make use of Binc IMAP 1.4. > Same here! >> GPL is a little strict on adding stuff (backends, extensions). Maybe LGPL >> is an alternative? > Specifically, what behavior does the GPL prohibit that you (or anyone > else) feels should not be prohibited? Adding a mailbox format, adding a depot format, adding in-house extensions, authentication modules, and so on. As long as it's GPL (and once GPL, always GPL), any intern who can get a hold of the software can distribute it. And that's food for lawyers of course, but it's scary enough to shake away many businessmen. Andy :-) -- Andreas Aardal Hanssen | http://www.andreas.hanssen.name/gpg Author of Binc IMAP | "It is better not to do something http://www.bincimap.org/ | than to do it poorly."
