Hi everyone,
I'm sorry to hop in that late. To be honest, I didn't come to a final
conclusion for myself, regarding the license-topic. Let me first say
that I wouldn't boycott the change to BSD. Still I need to say that I
have similar doubts like my previous speakers mentioned. One the one
hand I do trust Emmanuel who indicated that there is a strongly need of
this change to reach/hold companies that were interested in RIOT. Of
course there have been good resonance from some of these comapnies. On
the other hand I fear that BSD could lead to the situation that our work
might be "exploited" by some companies and the primary idea of a wider
propagation of RIOT will not take place, as one will not see the
RIOT-background in every application.
Regarding a the dual licensing I didn't understand the real concept
behind it maybe, but I can not see in which way this avoids the
mentioned doubts. What I see is an additional overhead of workload.
Best regards,
Peter K.
Am 15.12.2014 um 11:10 schrieb Ludwig Ortmann:
Hi,
All in all, dual licensing is an interesting thought, but I'm afraid
it inevitably leads to extra work and frustration.
Because the users of the commercial branch will most likely be a major
contributer of resources, the "free" branch would end up being treated
as a second class citizen.
(Please refer me to examples where this has not been the outcome if
they exist.)
As for the general topic of relicensing:
I would wish for a license with patent clauses for Christmas. But such
a clause is supposed to scare the big company lawyers away. So, a
switch to Apache would probably not help with the goal of getting big
companies to consider RIOT.
Personally, I'm not convinced these companies are really needed for
RIOT to stay alive. In order to cater to commercial use *today*
(because we don't currently have tools to help satisfy the linking
clause of the LGPL), I'd rather add a static linking exception to our
current license (or switch to GPL with linking exception which amounts
to the same as far as I remember). I am aware that this probably makes
the license even more troublesome for the lawyers in question as it
would probably need extra ratification, but it would help smaller
companies.
One aspect of this rationale is that we currently have several
interested smaller companies, while the big companies could as well
implement the missing bits themselves.
That being said I would also be excited to see some bigger company
contribute to RIOT. If switching to MIT is what it takes to achieve
this, I'm fine with it.
Cheers,
Ludwig
On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 09:51:13AM +0100, ROUSSEL Kévin wrote:
Hello everyone,
Maybe was it already envisioned, but another strategy would be dual
licensing, something akin to what FreeRTOS does for example.
Using this scheme:
* we got (L)GPL by default, for academic contributors and everyone that has
nothing against open-source;
* the same code can be licensed under an alternative license for those that
don't want to contribute back. Financial resources could even be drawn from
this, as the project could charge for such a proprietary license.
Of course, I guess this approach has its drawbacks; I was just citing a
possible alternative, I have not really thought about it.
Best regards,
KR
Le 12/12/2014 17:55, Emmanuel Baccelli a écrit :
Hi Johann,
Le 12 déc. 2014 00:48, "Johann Fischer" <johann_fisc...@posteo.de
<mailto:johann_fisc...@posteo.de>> a écrit :
Can you explain exactly what you expect of licence change? That more
hardware
will be supported? That RIOT will be more spread?
The motivation for a more permissive license now is that the RIOT
community has significantly more chances to spread and reach a critical
mass fast enough to not let the current momentum go to waste.
There might be other strategies to reach critical mass, but for now,
none have been brought forward.
Reaching critical mass is arguably an important goal. If the community
does not reach this goal, it might not survive -- and none of us wants that.
Thus this thread, to propose and discuss a strategy based on a license
change allowing direct and indirect interactions with more industrial
partners.
I agree this strategy is not without potential drawbacks. Other strategy
proposals are very welcome ;). My main point is: we need a strategy.
Cheers,
Emmanuel
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Kévin Roussel
Doctorant, projet LAR
Équipe MADYNES, INRIA Nancy Grand-Est / LORIA
Tél. : +33 3 54 95 86 27
kevin.rous...@inria.fr
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