Hi Jeffrey, I'm no licensing expert, but it seems to me if a company forbids employees to read LGPL code out of fear, that is their choice. We live in a world where capital gets its way over labour far too often - so much so it hurts capital growth itself. I think software freedom and copyleft, even the limited LGPL, are important and that going too permissive has its own negative consequences for the gift economy we enjoy.
Its your code and project, whatever you choose I'm just grateful for your immense contribution. Cheers, Andrew Kirkpatrick On 21 January 2015 at 14:40, Jeffrey Kegler <[email protected]> wrote: > I want to ask opinions about two licensing changes I am thinking of > > 1.) Switching Libmarpa to the MIT/Lua license. Currently there are some > companies that forbid their employees to read LGPL code, because of the > danger to their IP in the code that those employees write. In the case of > Libmarpa, I *want* people to read my code -- they can read my papers, and > the code supplements and illustrates those papers, so it makes little sense > to restrict it. Moving to an MIT license means that people will be able to > use the Libmarpa code freely in proprietary code. There is a downside to > this, but the Lua folks and increasingly the open source community seem to > be embracing this trade-off as a win. > > 2.) Changing both Marpa::R2 and Libmarpa so that anyone contributing code > assigns the copyright to me. The upside of this is that I can change the > license. That's also the downside -- I, or someone who managed to legally > take over the copyright from me, would have the right to change to a > proprietary license. I don't want to minimize this danger -- open source > software being taken proprietary is something that happens a lot. > > I think the trade-offs are in favor of copyright assignment to me. My plan > is to use the right to change the license to make licensing more liberal. > And note that current and past versions would remain subject to the old > open-source licenses -- neither I or anyone else has the right to rescind > those licenses. You could always "re-free" the software by starting over > from a fork of a previous open-source version. It's a hassle, but it can be > done if needed. And in a sense, it's a danger you are already running -- > even if I can't change the licensing, I might become a flaky project leader, > with the same practical effect. > > I'm keeping Marpa::R2 on the LGPL, at least for the time being. With > Libmarpa the asymmetry between by completely-open Theory papers and my > LGPL'd code makes the trade-off pretty clear. And nobody but me has made > any significant contribution to Libmarpa. With Marpa::R2, both these > factors are less clear. And in some months I expect it to be replaced with > a Kollos-based Marpa::R3, so that it's not worthwhile to spend a lot of time > rethinking Marpa::R2 licensing. > > A final note: Libmarpa contains some code derived from LGPL'd code written > by others -- GNU's obstack's, and Ben Pfaff's AVL code. This code must and > will remain LGPL'd. > > Thanks, jeffrey > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "marpa parser" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to [email protected]. > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "marpa parser" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
