Hello Bud,
I think that the reason that RMS put up the license page at FSF is to help
illustrate the problem with other "open-source" licenses. I really do not
want to start a religious war over OS/licenses/political parties, but the
more that I read about different licenses the more worried I become.
It has been a hard sell, but some events are starting to open the door to
large-scale development and use of open-source applications here. However,
one of the key points that has been hammered into meeting after meeting is
that the GPL is the tool to encourage contributions of source code. I
can't, in good conscience have my developers working on code that a
commercial company can grab next week and turn around and charge for. I am
not saying that they will, but they can and that falls under unacceptable
risk. I do not want to cause the HardHats to be upset, but they have to
IMHO change from public domain to GPL. Otherwise, I don't think that we can
use ANY code from them, since most of the projects listed on LinuxMedNews
are GPL. If the HardHats are willing to fork their code, that makes life
easy, but it raises huge issues that will not go away.
I hope that the spirit of cooperation that has existed between OIO and
FreePM is the norm rather then the exception. Please, projects leaders of
LinuxMedNews listed projects, make your license GPL! It makes life easier
in the long run, because more and more people are going to be looking for
problems in open-source and here we have a ready-made disaster, ripe for the
media.
Todd Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
From: Bud P. Bruegger [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
>I was thinking too that a general discussion could help, one that goes
>beyond just MUMPS/Vista. Some time ago I naively thought that reusing open
>source components in open source projects was easily possible. Since then
>I have started to look into practical cases and have learned to fear the
>license incompatibility problems.
>It would be interesting to discuss whether and how we could do our
>licensing to achieve the following: (my wishlist--up to discussion)
* allow all other open source healthcare people to use our components in
their projects. (If we splinter our efforts due to legal reasons, we would
lose a lot of momentum).
* protect us from companies/individuals who want to abuse open source (eg.
by changing 2 lines and then selling it closed source).
