On Friday, 25 July 2008, at 01:53:24 (+0200), Jorge Luis Zapata Muga wrote:
> Well, this thread has of course mutated from its original form, but > has raised several good opinions, and in fact it has turned into > "what do we do internally" with the efl. I tried to point people back to your original question, but I seem to have failed. :-] > If you think that a project is successful based on how many > companies have used your software then of course actually licensing > your sw is not a matter just give it to the world, bsd license is > the most free license (afaik) that you can have and of course you'll > find thousands of projects that are out there being closed or open > that use your software, so your meaning of successful is > achieved. So for companies that actually want to use someone else > code (because of a technical decision or not), and dont want or > can't send something back (code, money, whatever) to the author then > bsd is the best option. And that is indeed what happense on many on > the companies that use bsd code, they dont give back code, of course > they are not obligated to do so, its your license that allows that, > but is that what we want? You make a good point about how we measure "success" in terms of the previous assertions about one license or the other making us more "successful." You're absolutely right. And everything you said about the BSD license is also completely true and fair. As for the final question, "is that what we want?" From my perspective, it goes back to what Nathan said: Parts that are directly a *part of* EFL are almost certainly going to be given back because the cost of maintaining a fork (or a parallel LoD) is not insignificant. Works based on (i.e., making use of) the EFL which are separate, independent entities are almost certainly not going to be given back anyway because that's from where the company's profit is derived. > If your meaning of successful is on how many developers are out > there on bsd or *gpl projects, i really dont know the statistics, > but i think gpl is beyond, might be something related with the > media, maybe, but the number of developers is something we need. I'm not sure the simple quantity of developers on BSD- versus GPL-licensed projects is the right metric; a developer working on a GPL project may or may not be willing to contribute to a BSD project, and vice versa. Same with companies. Some companies like the GPL because it prevents competitors from co-opting, closed-sourcing, and extending their code. (This is the argument that Active Directory might not exist if Kerberos and OpenLDAP had been GPL'd instead of BSD'd. Then again, AD being based primarily on open standards helped quite a bit with creating free software that talks to AD...a task which would've been much harder had it been completely opaque and proprietary.) Other companies prefer the BSD license because promotes wider use and does not require them to give up their intellectual property rights. > But as my initial question, what happens with companies that > actually want to give something back, that believe in the concept of > community but dont want other companies that dont share the same > vision as you to use the code to make profit, close source, etc? i > think that for that case (and is not a small group of companies that > are working like that right now) bsd is not an option. When you release something under the BSD license, it is always under the BSD license. In order to closed-source it, they would have to make extensive modifications and provide significant value-add; otherwise, no one would use it when there's a freely-available BSD alternative. Active Directory is the only example I can think of right now where somebody did that to great success, and the success of AD was not due to AD itself, but rather the GUI tools they provided that made it "easy" (for some definition of that word) to set up and manage. X is actually a very good example of the opposite happening -- all the major UNIX vendors cooperated and collaborated to the mutual benefit of all. They did the same with CDE (taking HP's VUE front-end combined with Sun's tooltalk backend and making a desktop that ran on all 3 major UNIXes). > I think we should take this topic in the sense of what do we want or > expect from the e project. So for me and my vision of how e should > be, i want e to be open source, but i want all of its derivative > work to be also open source, i dont want to code on this project for > the next 5 years and suddenly the number of developers (which is > small) goes to zero, a company takes our code, close source it, and > then you see your code on the next cell phone you buy, it will be > frustrating. I think many of us want to make a living from it, at > the end is our effort and sacrifice that is in discussion here. Would it really frustrate you to see code you wrote ending up on a device lots of people use? Or would the frustrating part be the fact that they're making money from it? or that you had to pay for it? or that they didn't contribute anything back (which would be difficult if the developer count had gone to zero, since the project would be dead at that point)? Personally, I would love it if my phone were running my code. (For now, I'll have to settle for the fact that it's running the code of friends of mine.) If they're making money from it, and you're not, chances are they've done some sort of value add (or else everyone would use the freebie, as previously stated) to get people to pay for it. I don't think there are any simple answers here. Numerous companies with huge numbers of employees (and huge legal departments) are still trying to figure out how to balance open source, making money, and not getting taken advantage of. And if any one license (BSD, LGPL, or otherwise) were the key to doing that, we wouldn't have the NPL/MPL, the Computer Associates Trusted Open Source License, the IBM Public License, the Intel Open Source License, the Lucent Public License, the Microsoft Public License, *and* the Sun Public License...among dozens of others. Just take a gander at all the choices out there: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/alphabetical That's a lot of reading! :-) (I personally am quite fond of the Artistic License; it specifically allowed relicensing under other licenses or distributing changes under any license that qualifies as "Freely Available.") Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "I remember the time I knew what happiness was. Let the memory live again." -- "Memory", from /Cats/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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 enlightenment-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/enlightenment-devel
