Greetings Seb, Thank you for your reply. I have gained some insights into your viewpoint, but I must admit there are still some areas that I may not fully appreciate yet.
About using a web site for documentation and license notifications-- that sounds good, and actually in many cases that would be fine. But here in the USA, it is very common for a company to develop a product (lets call it a widget), and then re-sell it to many other companies, which incorporate the widget into their own products, in ways the original developer never imagined. So, requiring this documentation to be maintained all along the various product distribution channels and levels can be a challenge. About pre-programmed chips-- there have been some serious court battles concerning license violations. And these were with production, binary-only, embedded products. One or more of the original copyright/license holders, "reverse-engineered" the product, and was able to make a compelling argument to the courts. In turn, the courts forced the companies shipping the products to provide documentation, source code, emails, files from old backup media, etc, etc. And in fact the product was not honoring the agreement as it should have. So, this is why it is not at all "OK", to use a BSD license in your product, and then decide to not document the fact-- someone could take you to court, and (at least here in the USA), the lowly programmer who failed to alert his corporate attorneys ahead of time of that possibility, will likely lose his job, at a minimum. Now then, it seems to me, we are mainly in agreement, you and I. I would like to give credit where it is due, especially if I am re-using source code. But to say that after I develop a "widget", and sell it to a distributor, that I will always and forever keep track of where it ends up, and make sure that everyone along the way also gives credit where it is due-- that is too much for me to agree to. It isn't that I don't care, it just isn't practical. About the 2-clause versus 3-clause. I was trying to point out that, you seem to be contradicting yourself-- you want credit where it is due, but actually the 3rd clause prohibits this, at least in some situations. For example, if my product announcement says "My product is faster, better, smarter because I use JALLIB", that would break the rules. Why would you want to resrict that? The 2-clause still has a huge disclaimer that should be sufficient protection. Now you really didn't yet say specifically what you don't like about zlib, and indeed, you haven't indicated that you've bothered to look at it. In fact, it is "GPL compatible", and you can read about it at the GNU GPL site, and it is also accepted by OSI. The main thing is that while it encourages you to give credit where it is due, it doesn't insist on it. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zlib_License In summary, it seems to me that the big concern should be for other developers, and how they use and distribute the source code. Thank you, William --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "jallib" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/jallib?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
