On Mon, Jun 23, 2008 at 06:07:08PM +0200, Paolo Cavallini wrote: > Dave McIlhagga ha scritto: > > > Similarly there are many good reasons for the long-term sustainability > > of the project to embrace a more open license such as the BSD which > > welcomes all participants - even if they have proprietary commercial > > interest. We avoid GPL like the plague for exactly this reason. > > I knew I was starting a flame... > >From a game theory perspective, GPL is more widespread, ie evolutionary > more successful, because of its hereditary properties. > But we're getting OT, probably.
Somewhat. But I think there are serious considerations to how GPL works in a particular context. Web pages are almost always 'proprietary': The majority of them are copyrighted content, used by the entity publishing the website to convey some information. Now, if I am building a website, and I want to include an OpenLayers Map -- imagining, for the time being, that OpenLayers is GPL Licensed -- what does that mean that my licensing restrictions are? The GPL requires that 'derivative works' are also licensed under the GPL, as far as I know. Is my website a derivative work? How far does that go -- just the pages? The code that generates the pages? Questions like this aren't (afaik) well documented: I have actively avoided using ExtJs in my web pages, not because I care about giving the code away -- I do that anyway -- but because I don't understand what I have to do in order to comply, or how far the restrictions pass on. (Do I need to release my page rendering PHP code, too?) GPL makes sense for many things, but for Javascript libraries, it brings up many questions, and (despite spending a lot of time on licensing bulls**t) I don't really understand well enough to provide any answers: if I were going to start work on something, I'd probably skip over GPL libraries -- and that's the kind of thing that can be difficult for an open source project to overcome. I think this much more true for OpenLayers than for the TME application -- the likelihood of the TME code needing to be integrated tightly into an existing application which doesn't make sense as GPL is somewhat lower. Still, my statment stands: the lines for GPL get very confusing when you're talking about Javascript libraries, and I have seen a number of cases where GPL JS projects lost potential contributors for this reason. Another geo-related example is AGG: MapServer uses it, but both Debian and MapServer have stuck to the 2.4 release, because it was permissively licensed, as opposed to the 2.5 release, licensed as GPL. This core library license change has led to significant discussions of a fork because the underlying library is important enough -- and the license problematic enough -- that contributors have expressed some interest in maintaining their own rather than accepting the GPL. There are costs to choosing the GPL license for a project. There are benefits. I'm merely advising that for Javascript libraries, I think the costs outweight the benefits. Regards, -- Christopher Schmidt Web Developer _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list Discuss@lists.osgeo.org http://lists.osgeo.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss
