On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 8:57 AM, Cedric BAIL <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On Tue, Jul 22, 2008 at 4:19 PM, Jose Gonzalez <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> Smarter or not.. again, who really knows. Companies make their choices, >> individuals make theirs.. each based on whatever set of reasons. Sometimes >> those reasons are the same or similar, sometimes they're not. For me, it's >> just a >> personal decision. > > That's true. I should have stated that using the EFL is only a > technical decision. But this is not something common. > > And despite what others could think, I think you are raising a very > good point. The way we handle this licence issue define how we handle > our current community and how we will grow. > > We should compare on this aspect with other toolkit community. Both > GTK and QT are around more or less as long as the E project exist. We > are all around since a decade now. > > So looking at GTK. Their core component are LGPL based. Many company > and individual are involing in this project, much more than in the E > project. For the company, I know for sure that many choose GTK because > of it's licence (all the big company that are ruled by intellectual > property rather than technical staff will choose LGPL, that's really a > fact). For individual, I think their is more people willing to > contribute to a project if they know that others will be forced to > help. But that's just an opinion, a feeling. > > Looking at QT. Their core component are GPL+proprietary licence. One > company, trolltech, is acting like a proxy for others company and > individuals. Contributing to the core is done mainly by Trolltech from > what I know (tell me if I am wrong), but as a community of developper > around this core, people benefit from the GPL effect and the growing > contribution to any of it's part. > > Both GTK and QT have now a good marketing force with a strong > community and part of this is due to this licence. Sure we could find > others reasons for this difference, but let's look at our community. > > Our core component are BSD based licence. We are less than five people > working now on the core (I include eet,evas,ecore,embryo and edje in > this core). A few company are using the EFL, their code is most of the > time proprietary, in some case they open it under LGPL and in a fewer > case they contribute to this core library. Much more individuals are > working with this core library and provide apps and library under the > licence they feel including BSD, LGPL and GPL. > > So we are definitively not a community working on the EFL, but a > community working with the EFL. We are not using them only to build > E17 and our CVS is more a community repository where many apps end. > And we should encourage the growth of this community. For this we > should let our users choose the licence they want and continue to make > our decision based on technical value. We never dictated the licence > of our users, that's how I understand the choice of our licence for > the core EFL. And I think we should continue to push this behaviour > forward, by letting any new open source code go inside our CVS. That's > how our community has grown in the past. > > But now that we have a decade of history, it's also a good time to > think about what we want and expect for the core EFL. I want this > community to continue to grow. I want more apps using the EFL. I want > the core EFL to be improved, get faster, better and I really would > like more contribution to the core. That's how I feel about this > project. And I think that Jorge and Jose mail where all about that. > And how we should act to improve the situation. > > I believe that puting the core EFL under a LGPL licence will help > having more company backing us and more people contributing to the > core. Eet, Embryo and Edje could be LGPL could be moved to LGPL > without any problem for any of our users. Evas and Ecore could be LGPL > also, as the engine are dynamically loaded and they are independent. > Perhaps we could explicitely state that engine could stay proprietary > as this could impact some of our users. But at the end I think, we > have a lot to win by switching the licence of the core to LGPL and > nothing to loose. > > This decision should have nothing to do with our religion about > freedom, but what we expect from this community and how we want it to > grow. It's not time for a flamewar, it's time to think and come with a > plan for the growth of this community. I know they are more subjects > than the licence, but this is the first and the one than will most > likely impact our community growth and the strength of it's core. This > decision will impact our users, that's true whatever it is. But this > will not change the way people use it. Just the power we give to > people using it. And if people have other idea to increase the > strength of contribution to the core, it's time to raise you voice.
I must say I agree with you, I do think the license is something that matters and LGPL is better for something as EFL. I also agree that "we decided this 10 years ago and we'll not rethink" is a bad thing, damn, some of the guys that did this decision 10 years ago don't even write code nowadays, they don't work or want to work with current code base and if the project goes like that, it's a dead end for sure. One thing I'd like to see here is the opinion of those that do most of the code these days, guys like englebass, dj2, pfritz and raster. You wrote lots of code already, and continue to do, what do you think about relicensing the code under LGPL? -- Gustavo Sverzut Barbieri http://profusion.mobi embedded systems -------------------------------------- MSN: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Skype: gsbarbieri Mobile: +55 (19) 9225-2202 ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the Moblin Your Move Developer's challenge Build the coolest Linux based applications with Moblin SDK & win great prizes Grand prize is a trip for two to an Open Source event anywhere in the world http://moblin-contest.org/redirect.php?banner_id=100&url=/ _______________________________________________ enlightenment-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
