Hi Johan, On Mon, Dec 8, 2014 at 1:27 AM, Johann Fischer <johann_fisc...@posteo.de> wrote:
> Hello RIOTers, > > Emmanuel Baccelli <emmanuel.bacce...@inria.fr> wrote: > > we have been receiving an increasing amount of negative feedback from > > various companies concerning the practical usability of our LGPL license > in > > their context, being a show-stopper. > > They always do that. We have seen it in other successful projects such as > linux > kernel. I see RIOT as a part of a free an open infrastructure. > And for the IoT we need an open infrastructure. There are > companies that use (public) infrastructure but want to give anything back > and > BSD license favored this behavior. RIOT should not be another Contiki. > > I agree with you: we need "another Linux" and not "another Contiki". But two questions: (1) can we realistically mimic the Linux story and stay with LGPL? (2) why would RIOT necessarily become "another Contiki" if the license evolves to BSD/MIT? Concerning (1): what does our experience from the last year show? That LGPL is far from a perfect solution, because too many company lawyers cannot deal with it. On the other hand, we know that BSD/MIT also has its down sides. So we have to trade-off between the "dangers of BSD/MIT" and the "dangers of LGPL". There is no perfect solution, I agree. But still, we have to make a choice. On one hand, if we do not change the license, we can force people to do things our way, and it has indeed moral value. But it's difficult to force people/companies to do things. Those who do not want to, or cannot, "give back" will simply not use RIOT in the first place -- hence a much slower adoption that looks like a potentially fatal problem in the short term. If we change the license, some people/companies could indeed fork and close their source, and that is not what we want. However, these people will use RIOT and have a chance to change their mind about contributing back -- when they realize the burden of rebasing their code all the time. The bet is that the momentum in the community will remain sufficiently attractive to aggregate enough contributions to thrive in the mid-term. What is the most unclear to me is: what are the consequences of the choice of license in the long run? However, one thing is for sure: this question is irrelevant if we're out in the mid-term. The value of an open source community is equally (i) the quality of the code base it provides and (i) the liveliness of the community. So concerning (2), do you think BSD/MIT would: - harm the RIOT community? - harm the RIOT code base? If so how, and at which stage (short, mid long term), and how bad? Is it worse the risks of too slow adoption if we stay with LGPL? This is what we really have to gauge now. Cheers Emmanuel > But in the first place, we would like to debate this topic. In particular: > > is anyone violently opposing the idea of migrating to a less restrictive > > license, such as BSD? If so, why? On the other hand, if you explicitly > > support the license change, feel free to indicate this as well. Please > send > > your opinion to the list before Dec. 10th. > > I am absolutely against the BSD license and I see no necessity for it. RIOT > will be successful without this change. > > > That is my personal opinion, not the company where I work. > > Best regards > Johann Fischer > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list > devel@riot-os.org > http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel >
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