On Friday, 25 July 2008, at 15:49:01 (+0200), Cedric BAIL wrote: > That's just wrong.
No, it's not "just wrong." You may not agree with it, but that doesn't make it wrong, particularly if you don't offer any counterexamples or evidence to prove it. > Maintaining a fork is in my opinion completely doable and will > really not cost much. If maintaining a fork were easy, there'd be who-knows-how-many old Linux kernel forks still alive, samba-tng would not be foundering, and Canonical would only have to employ salespeople. It's simply not that easy. Ask RedHat how many developers they employ to maintain the kernel packages for each of their distros (which are essentially forks, albeit with a well-defined life span). It's doable but costly, and more often than not, the costs outweigh the gains. And none of the successful forks I can think of, including the ones I mentioned, are closed forks, other than the previous example I gave yesterday (of which I've yet to see another). (And regarding that one example, I'll say it again: The fact that Microsoft *used* the standard proves that the BSD license did its job: promoting use and sharing.) > We are a few people, with less 5 of us breaking things in the > core. I have almost 20 differents git branch on my hard drive of the > CVS. Each of them could be considered as a fork. In fact they are > just big change waiting for review or a good time to break E CVS > again. Nothing force me to give them back, running a git pull is > enought most of the time for keeping this "fork" alive and running. And for how long would you do this? 6 months? A year? Two? The longer you try to keep it up, the harder and harder it gets. Trust me; I've done it multiple times for a year or more. Costs increase exponentially with time. > I don't understand your statement. The BSD license give you the > right to distribute just the binary. It doesn't say anything about > the amount of change you need to do to distribute it in binary form. Distributing a binary doesn't make it "closed source." If you make changes and *then* distribute a binary, your changes are closed source, but as I said, unless they're appreciably different from the original, it's not compelling or significant. > And a modified EFL library distributed as a binary is useless expect > for the application that was designed to use it. So yes, people will > use the freely availabe one, but nobody benefit from the improvement > and change made for the binary one. Which is why that generally doesn't happen: they gain nothing by keeping it closed, but they could potentially gain a great deal from opening it. And they tend to do just that. Mission accomplished. :-) > Yes, X is a good example. They did fork to solve some of their problem. And why did they fork? Because the previous project lead changed the license. Q.E.D. ;-) > You got the point. Today we need less than 5 trucks to stop this > project. This is an issue. By switching the core library to LGPL, it > will be easier to advocate them and gain more core developper. See, people keeping saying that, but so far there's been absolutely no proof or evidence whatsoever that this is actually true. > It's nice to see my code running on any device that's sure, but I > really don't care. What I care is about this project. I want it to > grow, to be faster, smaller and have more features (nah, it's > possible :-) ). I want it to be strong and survive 5 trucks. I want > to see more beautifull apps using it. I don't think anyone is disagreeing with those things. But so far no one has proven that changing the license will accomplish that. Michael -- Michael Jennings (a.k.a. KainX) http://www.kainx.org/ <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Linux Server/Cluster Admin, LBL.gov Author, Eterm (www.eterm.org) ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "It's late in the evening. She's wondering what clothes to wear. She puts on her make up and brushes her long, blonde hair. And then she asks me, 'Do I look alright?' And I say, 'Yes, you look wonderful tonight.' " -- Eric Clapton, "Wonderful Tonight" ------------------------------------------------------------------------- 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
