Thanks very much for your feedback!
| I was pleased to hear that the next version of Hugs will be going Open
| Source under the Artistic Licence. I'd like to suggest that you
| consider offering a choice of licences, and support the GPL also.
I've already been considering something like this as a result of feedback
from other Hugs users, but I have to admit that I don't feel particularly
comfortable about it, and don't expect things to change in the final Hugs 98
release.
| The reason for this is the GNU Readline library.
Readline is not a reason for going GPL. If you want command line editing,
then you can use editline, which is a fraction of the size of readline and
doesn't require GPL. (Ok, so it doesn't do *-completion, but we don't use
that at the moment anyway.)
In fact I think the readline situation illustrates one of the arguments for
being wary about a GPLed Hugs:
| ... But in order to distribute
| precompiled binaries using Readline, they must be GPLed.
The implication here seems to be that if Hugs itself was GPLed, then people
who wanted to develop and distribute tools of their own that used Hugs would
also have to put their software under the GPL. This seems to be a step in
the wrong direction: we want to make it easier for people to use Hugs, not
to give them extra restrictions.
| ... If you could
| do as Perl does, and offer a choice of two licences, that would become
| possible.
I'd like to look into this more closely, when I get a chance, but I am
again cautious. Does a choice between licenses offer the best or the
worst of both worlds?
With this recent release of Hugs, we've made a big attempt to give Hugs a
friendlier and less restrictive license. The discoveries that I've made
since then have, to be honest, left me feeling a little disillusioned.
It seems that Open Source is not enough. If Henry Ford we alive today,
he might well say `you can have any license you like, as long as it's GPL.'
Bottom line: the subject is still on the table, but it will take some time
to fully understand and appreciate the implications of further changes, so
we're not going to rush into anything now.
All the best,
Mark
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Mark P Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Currently in transition to OGI
Please bear with me while I'm moving; I don't get to read email too often,
and it may be several days later before I get a chance to reply.
