On 2 Jun 2014, at 23:47, "Lundberg, Johannes" <[email protected]> wrote:
> I believe a switch to BSD license could possibly be healthy for this project. > As many companies who want to use this project but can not due to GPL/LGPL. > Surely all improvements would not be committed upstream but maybe more than > is currently. I don't agree with this for the simple reason that I have seen no evidence of many companies being unable to use GNUstep due to licensing. On the contrary, I work for companies that sell to major international telecoms operators ... big, conservative companies ... who don't have a problem with the license. What I have come across personally though, is a small number of companies who were initially against including/using free software, but changed their position when the actual license was shown to them (ie they had an initial uneducated reaction influenced by FUD). While there will undoubtedly be a few people who might want to use the software in a way that's incompatible with the license, there can't be many since the LGPL is actually very permissive (and it's hard to make other software *depend* on the the few GPL tools in a way that would bring it under the GPL). My impression is that the people who say the license is a problem are mostly those who are already advocates of BSD and/or negative about the FSF, and while I don't doubt that their beliefs are honestly held, I question the degree to which such a person would have argued in favour of using GNU software in a company. So my feeling is that the number of companies for which the license is an issue is few rather than many, and that they are probably over-reported too. On the issue of copyright my feeling is similar but different; I know people hate the admin process of doing the copyright assignment (much more than people disliking the principle, though there are a few of those too), but we need the copyright to be assigned to the FSF (or some similar arrangement to ensure that all code in the project is legitimately released under the LGPL license we are using) because otherwise the companies I deal with really might have a problem using GNUstep. If GNUstep contained components for which there was uncertainty about whether the code was actually under the LGPL license then these companies would not dare to use it; they need confidence in the legitimacy of the code. I don't think copyright assignment to the FSF is the only way to get that, but if we abandoned that we'd need to put something else in its place, and the admin overhead of the replacement is likely to be just as onerous (or worse than) the existing process. About the small number of people with philosophical objections; do they outnumber those with philosophical objections to *not* assigning copyright? I don't know what the ratio of dedicated-free-software-developers to anti-free-software-developers is. _______________________________________________ Discuss-gnustep mailing list [email protected] https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss-gnustep
