Mark Wielaard wrote:
But shouldn't this go both ways - should not anything contributed to any
of those projects be able to be shared with Harmony? AFAIK many of the
contributors make a conscious decision about which licenses they will or
will not contribute their work under.
We can clearly only decide about our own Harmony work. And what we
accept as contributions in that space. I would love to go both ways with
code from already free and hopefully soon liberated proprietary code
bases, but that might not be possible in the short term.
right.
For Harmony we can lead by example. We are starting here with a clean
slate. Lets not by default adopt a policy that would prevent adoption of
the code by most of the existing projects. I started this effort
together with the others to build bridges between the existing projects.
That is a long process with many steps. Lets not make the mistake to
close the bridge as the first step by adopting a default license policy
that prevents cooperation with the existing free software projects.
I don't disagree with what you are saying but I am not sure there is any
need for action at this time. Geir has said that there are people who
are trying to work out the license issues between ASL/GPL code at the
moment. (I assume people inside Apache foundation and FSF). I think it
may be a good idea to assume that this will eventually work out and
people who want to use ASL code in GPL-ed works are able to. If this is
wrong feel free to speak up. Until such a time where these talks break
down or "fail" I think it may be more productive to steer away from more
license discussions. What do you think?
---
Cheers,
Peter Donald
"I have never killed a man, but I have read
many obituaries with great pleasure."
- Clarence Darrow
