@Andrew: Thanks for your kind words. One of my motivations was a recent reddit exchange, where someone under a "no reading GPL code" restriction and his employer got really beat up over this by other redditers. I thought a lot about the trade-offs -- on one hand he was very sincerely interested in my work. On the other hand, if he used my ideas at work, his improvements would very likely disappear into a proprietary compiler I would never hear about and probably could not afford to use.
On reflection, I believe that Marpa's core is mathematics, and I just don't feel comfortable with putting anything but the most liberal of licenses on mathematics. I think as you get to layers above Libmarpa, and away from the math, more restrictive licenses make more sense. For someone to slap a more restrictive license on a parser built on top of Marpa would not bother me a bit. And if I were Linus Torvalds deciding about Linux, I would not budge a centimeter from the GPL. On Tue, Jan 20, 2015 at 8:54 PM, Andrew Kirkpatrick <[email protected]> wrote: > 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. > -- 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.
