On Tuesday 13 May 2008, Ales Hvezda wrote: > As a reminder, be careful when integrating outside code into > gEDA please. Be sure that the license is fully compatible > with the GPL. An unfortunate incident occurred with Kicad:
As another reminder, something like that is the reason NGspice is not in Debian. It kept KDE out of Debian until they changed the license on QT. Licensing is serious. It's all in the legalese. Regardless of your intentions, users and distributors go strictly by what the license says. Having said that .. one way to work around licensing issues is with plugins, distributed separately. Obviously, this only works when the code in question is optional. You distribute the core under one license, and plugins under another. You might need a license exception "It is ok to make plugins under any license". I believe Linux has an exception like this, to allow non-GPL programs as applications. A while back, I had a discussion with GNU's lawyers about this, and decided for now to do nothing special. > Hehe, plus as you can read later in that thread, a Kicad > developer might be interested in copying some "copyrighted > code" from PCB. Nice. Maybe they can help us find bugs and > maintain some shared code. :-) When you say "find bugs", that is a big turn-off. Finding bugs is the least important of all coding help. If the developer can't find the bug, probably it will be even harder for outsiders. The real way people can help is to develop new features, to document, to test, ... Aside from that, this fragmentation hurts us all. All of these tools are limited in what they can do by available development resources. Some teamwork would go a long way. But, somebody wants to work on something, wants his own, doesn't like something about the architecture or culture of the existing one, ..... and we split. _______________________________________________ geda-dev mailing list [email protected] http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-dev
