This prooves to be a much more complex issue than I thought. It is very
interesting though.
The license should primarily show our intentions for the collaboration with
other parties, companies and prospective contributors. Guesses on the
likelyhood on how someone is going to break the license and how we shall go
about to enforce the license should we find that someone has broken it is a
little to complicated and hypothetic to me.
I will erase the BSD suggestion, that one will not come into question.
/Linus
2007/11/2, Tom Morris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>:
>
> I'm not sure I buy the premise that there are lots of small companies
> willing to bet their existence on breaking the law and not getting
> caught AND that those same companies would be deterred by the
> difference, if any, in enforcement between GPL and EPL.
>
> > The EPL was created by IBM to allow it to make proprietary extensions
> while keeping
> > the growing Eclipse open source community content. It appears to have
> been
> > very successful for the Eclipse project.
>
> I'm not a huge fan of the undue influence that IBM exerts, but this
> doesn't match my understanding of the history. IBM created the Common
> Public License and the Eclipse Foundation created the Eclipse Public
> License. The initial Eclipse source came entirely from IBM, so they
> didn't need a license to do *anything* with it. More recently there
> have been significant contributions of source code and cash from a
> number of other significant players and the Eclipse Foundation lawyers
> are charged with protecting all the intellectual property that it
> owns.
>
> > ArgoUML could switch to the GPL v2 now, and announce that it will
> consider
> > requests for a different license. This would allow any serious large
> > companies to approach ArgoUML to do extensions.
>
> That doesn't work. The only way have clear provenance for the source
> code is to get *all* contributors to contractually agree to the new
> license if its terms conflict with the old license. From a practical
> point of view that means that you need to a) draft contributor's
> agreement that names the multiple license and b) get each contributor
> to sign it before adding their contributions to the source pool.
> Going back and doing this after the fact is a nightmare. Going from
> BSD to anything else is a special case because the starting license is
> so permissive.
>
> The fact that you have to say "GPL v2" highlights another issue with
> the GPL in addition to the fact that it prohibits commercial
> extensions. It's a moving target. This year Stallman was fixated on
> changing it to punish Novell/Microsoft. Who knows what next year will
> bring?
>
> > Frankly, my concern is that there are unscrupulous small-to-medium size
> > companies that have and will copy and modify open source code without
> any
> > attribution and/or any investment back to the projects they took the
> code..
> > Without mentioning names, I have heard specific allegations from
> informed
> > sources about a "medium" sized company in the UML tools market has done
> that
> > on a consistent basis. This is the type of company that concerns me.
>
> If you're confident of your (anonymous) sources and are that
> concerned, I'd suggest taking the issue to a court of your choosing.
> It clearly doesn't involve ArgoUML since what you describe would be
> legal for ArgoUML code.
>
> > If ArgoUML should attract serious interest from a large software
> company,
> > they will just offer fat salaries to some or all of the key developers
> of
> > ArgoUML.
>
> And this would be who? IBM/Rational? Already have one or two UML
> tools. Microsoft? Don't do UML. I'd love to hear who the candidates
> are.
>
> > I should also note there have been several GPL software projects
> > that have been effectively "acquired", so the GPL wouldn't be barrier
> that
> > kind of acquisition..
>
> This goes back to what I mentioned before about clear provenance. It
> works if you've got a sole author or a set of contributors who are
> willing to sign a contract assigning their copyright, but it doesn't
> work for a code base with dozens of contributors, some of whom can no
> long be found, if the existing license doesn't already allow for it.
>
> > If it is a large company, you can negotiate for something in return. ;-)
>
> As soon as we start operating as a commercial entity, we'd likely no
> longer qualify for the Software Conservancy.
>
> > IMHO, any alternative to the GPL will not give ArgoUML any practical
> > protection for the reasons I stated above.
>
> I don't know Mr. Moglen myself, so I'm not really in a position to
> refute your claims that he selectively defends his clients'
> intellectual property rights to suit his personal preferences. It's a
> pretty serious charge though, so I'd hope to see some substantiation
> before we made a decision based on it. Is LGPL close enough that he'd
> enforce it or is it "GPL or nothing"? LGPL has about the same balance
> between commerical and open source interests as EPL. Can we get some
> facts and figures -- or at least pointers to non-anonymous sources
> -- to support the argument that nothing except the GPL will be
> enforced?
>
> Tom
>
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