On Tue, 9 Dec 2014 16:31:00 +0100 Emmanuel Baccelli <emmanuel.bacce...@inria.fr> wrote:
> 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. Hello Emmanuel, sorry for late reply. The company where I work develops and produces embedded boards and makes the portings of linux kernel. We know the advantages and disadvantages of (L)GPL. We spend time and money to porting linux to our boards because we want to sale hardware and our customers benefit from it. > What is the most unclear to me is: what are the consequences of the choice > of license in the long run? Can you explain exactly what you expect of licence change? That more hardware will be supported? That RIOT will be more spread? There are also companies that have made the ports for contiki but will only give the porting for the hardware back to the project, but not the improvements of core (I can not say more). > 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? -yes, not everyone will agree with the change. > - harm the RIOT code base? -no, but I think it will not improve the 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. Johann Fischer _______________________________________________ devel mailing list devel@riot-os.org http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel
