On Monday, August 8 at 08:29 AM, quoth Andreas Aardal Hanssen:
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.
True, but Google isn't exactly making their IMAP server available for download either.
I get your point, though. I would posit that perhaps what would need to happen (if you wanted to make it so people could make their own backends) is that Binc needs a backend API: make it modular, so that backends can be loaded rather than requiring them to be built in. This allows improvements to the frontend to be required-to-be-shared, while backends can be developed separately and kept secret.
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.
I think modularity is probably the way to go if that's what you want to encourage.
~Kyle
--
Truth is not determined by a majority vote.
-- Pope Benedict XVI
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