I entirely understand where Johann is coming from. My view are very similar; companies all over the world beat up on Linux in the early days because of the GPL but all these years later things have died down and multibillion dollar transnational corporations are not only still contributing to the Linux kernel but are increasing their involvement. If you had asked me fifteen years ago if I thought Microsoft would be contributing I would have likely laughed in your face. The Linux kernel is proof that the GPL *is* a real option for open projects.
That being said... I still wonder if even a quite permissive copyleft license like the LGPL is truly suitable for an embedded operating system. We all know how even little changes to an embedded system can require deep changes to the core of the OS. More than anything I'd like to see RIOT succeed and take its place as one of the core components in the IOT world but I think the choice of license that covers the core OS is going to play an incredibly important part in deciding whether or not that is going to happen. In my ever so humble opinion RIOT is in an unbelievably strong position from a technical standpoint but unfortunately we don't necessarily live in a world run by meritocrats. In my opinion there are *at least* two things that need to be figured out for an open project like RIOT to succeed and they're inexorably intertwined. Those things are license and community structure/governance. A project's core license and its community structure each have a huge impact on the other and the project as a whole. I suppose I'm a little more on the fence than I originally thought. Or, maybe I just want to make sure that all potential outcomes are evaluated and the decisions that are made are well thought out. A license change is a fairly large undertaking and is fraught with potential peril. A change from a copyleft license to a more permissive license, be it BSD, MIT, X11 or something similar can never be undone; once the code has be released it can never entirely be brought back under a copyleft license. Of course it can, but doing so doesn't eliminate the liberally licensed version from the universe and the project can be easily forked from using that code. Emmanuel made a great point when he said that we should distinguish between the two aspects of the change, the idea, and the effects in practice. In an more ideal world *I* would like to see the LGPL win out but in terms of practicality I wonder if companies and even research groups are going to be willing to take on the additional workload that the LGPL demands in the form of making each and every one of their changes available to their end users and in turn to the wider community. There's another option on the table that would allow a potential license change to be put off for some time while still being able to do it with minimal headache down the road. Any license change is obviously going to require all the past contributors to agree to it so what about keeping the LGPL license for now and asking those contributors and future contributors to sign an SLA. One of the downsides to an SLA is that a legal entity (e.g. RIOT e.v.) would have to be created and managed. Okay, that's enough from me for the moment.There are other things in my life that I must attend to and Monday is near a close. Adam Hunt On Mon Dec 08 2014 at 1:49:32 PM Johann Fischer <johann_fisc...@posteo.de> wrote: > Hello RIOTers, > > Emmanuel Baccelli <emmanuel.bacce...@inria.fr> wrote: > > we have been receiving an increasing amount of negative feedback from > > various companies concerning the practical usability of our LGPL license > in > > their context, being a show-stopper. > > They always do that. We have seen it in other successful projects such as > linux > kernel. I see RIOT as a part of a free an open infrastructure. > And for the IoT we need an open infrastructure. There are > companies that use (public) infrastructure but want to give anything back > and > BSD license favored this behavior. RIOT should not be another Contiki. > > > But in the first place, we would like to debate this topic. In > particular: > > is anyone violently opposing the idea of migrating to a less restrictive > > license, such as BSD? If so, why? On the other hand, if you explicitly > > support the license change, feel free to indicate this as well. Please > send > > your opinion to the list before Dec. 10th. > > I am absolutely against the BSD license and I see no necessity for it. RIOT > will be successful without this change. > > That is my personal opinion, not the company where I work. > > Best regards > Johann Fischer > _______________________________________________ > devel mailing list > devel@riot-os.org > http://lists.riot-os.org/mailman/listinfo/devel >
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