Michael Fair : My two bits on the licensing thing. I am in favor of
building an OpenTalk interpreter like an embedded Metacard product and
putting it under the LGPL. Then with that LGPL'd product building the
OC program under the GPL and creating a well defined plugin
architecture, adding the necessary object hierarchical messaging
systems.
Alain : A plugin architecture is probably indispensable. Everybody is
doing these days.
Michael Fair : Plugins could be commercial as they are their own source
code trees independent of the OpenCard product.
Alain : OK, but we probably don't want to develop everything as
plugins. OC would be slow and a hassle to maintain. My web users detest
downloading, installing and configuring plugins, expecially if all of
this has to be done frequently.
Michael Fair : And if someone wanted to create a competing commercial
product that used the OpenTalk engine they could, because the engine is
under the LGPL.
Alain : Is that good ??
Anthony : But once OpenCard is under the GPL, one could not create a
standalone except if it were also under the GPL. One could not use any
icons, resources, etc. from OpenCard is a stack unless that stack were
too under the GPL. The GPL spreads like a virus.
Alain : This is unacceptable to me. The standalones that I will develop
with OC will have little or nothing to do with OC itself. OC is merely
a tool. A means to achieve an end. Imagine if they had had a similar
licence for the proverbial typewriter. Everything written with it would
henceforth be the intellectual property of Edison.
Michael Fair : If people just wanted to add some expensive features to
the OpenCard product and weren't able to OpenSource the extension they
could via the plugin architecture.
Alain : Yup!
Michael Fair : By placing the OpenCard product under the GPL it
prevents commercial developers from stealing the OpenCard code and
giving us nothing.
Alain : That's reassuring.
Michael Fair : It doesn't stop them from selling it, support licensing,
or anything else.
Alain : Seems like a ... very GENEROUS offer.
Anthony: But it does stop them from making standalones!
Alain : HyperCard allows standalones without any licencing hassles. If
HyperCard did it, why can't we?
Michael Fair : Developers could still retain control over the licensing
of their scripts because those scripts are not part of the source code
base and are also their own entity ...
Alain : Are we still talking about plugins, or more generally about any
code-modifications of OpenCard?
Michael Fair : Any licensing for products developed with OpenCard are
of course at the discretion of the developer because the interpreter
they are using as their "run-time" is under the LGPL.
Alain : What do you mean by "at the discretion of the developer"?
Separate licences for each component??
Anthony : The interpreter, if incorporated in a GPL product (opencard)
would have to exercise the convert to gpl clause; that is, the
Interpreter that came with OpenCard would of neccessity be under the
GPL, not the LGPL.
Alain : What are you leaning towards now, Anthony? GPL or Perl
Artistic Licence or something else?
_________________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
