On Thu, Jul 24, 2008 at 12:25 PM, Vincent Torri <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > I've learned a lot about the licences reading these mails, and it seems > that the fact is not "such licence is a hindrance" but "such licence can > give us developpers". That's different. So, from what i've understood, wrt > companies : > > 1) either with stay with BSD, and only the companies that accept to work > with code licenced under BSD would eventually share code with us > > 2) either we switch to, for example LGPL, or other similar licence (I was > told that MPL is not that bad), and then companies that accept to share > code with LGPL AND BSD licenced code would eventually help us. The > difference can be great. > > So if we want to have more than 5 devs on the core efl, we should > seriously discuss about which licence to use.
First off, there are a lot of false assumptions and statements about history being thrown around in order to argue the point we should switch licenses. The library efforts around KDE and GNOME pre-date anything that is considered part of the EFL, or even the idea that E as a project is a platform. KDE is built on top of an already existing toolkit Qt which began development in 1991! A large proportion of the core development on this project is paid for by Trolltech (now Nokia). The functionality provided by Qt was a huge jumping off point to get KDE development rolling quickly. GTK+ on the other hand was written in 1997 for the GIMP and became a standalone library primarily because of the fact that the Qt license had a non-commercial use clause. This prevented it from being compatible with any OSI approved license (though OSI didn't exist at the time). For those people saying that E should be at the same place as GNOME, that is pretty off-base since E was the original GNOME window manager. Raster wrote the theme engine support for GTK+ while at RedHat, and E was being developed as part of the GNOME environment for a few years. Even after GNOME and E parted ways, we were still only a window manager and terminal project for the most part, with the only libraries being developed were for direct use by the window manager only. Also, if you look at the core libraries in use by GNOME, you would probably be surprised at how few people actually make changes to them on a regular basis. The advantage they tend to have is that there are enough people that some of them will touch GTK+ while others will touch another component such as Pango. Lastly, I think people are ignoring some major issues. For instance, the X desktop is so fragmented already between KDE and GNOME that it's hard for the majority of users to justify yet another major player that is not already established. As dan pointed out, we make this situation even worse by micro-fragmenting into duplicate projects within the E project. The fact that we don't have any applications that are clearly better than their counter-parts in other projects doesn't help either. We're reaching a point where many users never change their window manager or are content with the more integrated environments in KDE or GNOME, so providing a great window manager is a difficult selling point. We're seeing some nice headway in the embedded space, but this is an area that is difficult to attract broad community attention so far. So blaming the community size on the license seems like an exercise in finger pointing. Some of the most broadly adopted open source software is in the BSD/MIT/Apache family. FreeBSD is used extensively in server rooms (along with the other BSD's but they tend to be less popular). Apache drives a huge percentage of the web. Subversion is an example of commercially developed and supported software with the Apache license. X is on almost every Linux/UNIX desktop regardless of environment. Most operating systems TCP/IP implementations owe their roots to the code that came out of the original BSD distribution (though many of them have been re-implemented later). As you can tell, I'm pretty much against the idea of relicensing things, and I think the burden has been unfairly placed on the "old guard", as Gustavo seems to want to characterize some of us as, to justify the license. Let's flip this around, does anyone have a way to show that changing our license would result in community growth? Nathan ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
