Hi Emmanuel, all,
forgot to reply on this: We at HAW are fine with keeping LGPL license.
So no conflict from our side.
Best,
Thomas
On 22.03.2015 14:02, Emmanuel Baccelli wrote:
Dear all,
thanks for the input from everyone on this topic. It is a tough case to
decide, based on our long and detailed exchanges on this subject.
But it is probably time to conclude. At INRIA, we came up with the
following observations:
- there is no enthusiastic majority for a license change to BSD/MIT,
- as solutions competing with RIOT are quasi-exclusively BSD/MIT, (L)GPL
is a way to stand out positively.
Concerning this last point, we observed that staying on the (L)GPL side
strengthens our position comparing ourselves to Linux -- which has been
one of our key non-technical arguments so far.
Furthermore, studies such as [1] show that small companies and start-ups
are going to determine IoT. More than bigger companies, such small
structures need to spread development and maintenance costs for the
kernel and all the software that is not their core business. Our
analysis is that this is more compatible with (L)GPL than with BSD/MIT.
We are of the opinion that, compared to BSD/MIT, (L)GPL will improve
final user experience, security and privacy, by hindering device
lock-down, favoring up-to-date, and field-updgradable code. We think
this a more solid base to provide a consistent, compatible,
secure-by-default standard system which developers can build upon to
create trustworthy IoT applications.
Last but not least, we think that (L)GPL is a better base than BSD/MIT
to keep the community united in the mid and long run.
For these reasons, even though we still believe a switch to BSD/MIT
would facilitate RIOT's penetration rate initially, we want to continue
releasing under LGPLv2.1.
I also want to point out that even though this is basically "status
quo", we think this discussion was far from useless, because it helped
clarify where we stand, and for what.
From our point of view, the next steps are now to set up a non-profit
legal entity for RIOT, and to put CLAs in place, allowing non-exclusive
rights for the code to this legal structure.
Best,
Emmanuel
[1] http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/2869521
--
Prof. Dr. Thomas C. Schmidt
° Hamburg University of Applied Sciences Berliner Tor 7 °
° Dept. Informatik, Internet Technologies Group 20099 Hamburg, Germany °
° http://www.haw-hamburg.de/inet Fon: +49-40-42875-8452 °
° http://www.informatik.haw-hamburg.de/~schmidt Fax: +49-40-42875-8409 °
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