Rüdiger, first, I sympathize with some of your points about changes in
the industry. I was a professional developer starting over 20 years ago
(I started young), including working at a developer of software
development tools and equipment (e.g., ICEs) for critical embedded
systems. I won't go into all the pros and cons of open source, and will
simply acknowledge that "socializing" software development has indeed
eliminated some commercial product markets (while enabling others).
Regardless, if one is thinking in practical self-interest, as commercial
enterprises tend to do, one often must use open source software to be
competitive, like you said.
Regarding licenses, for example, if your company were to build an
embedded product upon some commercial platform, probably the company
would sign a license agreement only after review by corporate counsel.
Similarly, before building Racket into a million units, you'd want to
have that same corporate counsel review Racket's license. At point of
review, your counsel might already be familiar with open source and
could rubber-stamp an LGPL license in a few minutes (and round up to a
billable hour). It's conceivable that your counsel would want
clarification on some nuance of the license, and then you can then
approach PLT, Inc. with a clear question, and go from there. I don't
see this as too different from securing a commercial license agreement.
I understand that embedded systems are especially tricky. A lot of
people doing contemporary server-side development, on the other hand,
typically already have hundreds of LGPL/BSD/etc.-licensed libraries,
programs, and OS installed on each of their production servers, so
Racket's LGPL 2.1 license needs hardly a glance.
If you are concerned about the market for high-skilled developers
eroding (at the same time as much of the rest of Western economies get
ripped apart), there are worse things you can do than to embrace the
market changes and advanced technologies, by using Racket helping to
create jobs for more high-skilled Racket developers. (Full disclosure:
I'm a consultant who prefers to work on Racket-related projects, so the
more people using Racket, the better for me.)
Neil V.
--
http://www.neilvandyke.org/
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