Re: [riot-devel] [riot-users] Switch to BSD?

[Martin]

(sorry for the post in users)
Hi all,

sorry for the late reply.

I'm not against a license change in general.

I understand the positions of companies to be restrained on LGPL.
They will not provide much effort, in manpower and finance, to find a
way to link their implementations to RIOT not violating LGPL.
Just as Joakim stated, R&D always produce an amount confidential parts
of code that cannot be released to the public.

I see a license change pragmatically, I don't expect that most companies
that insist turning from LGPL to a less restrictive license such as
BSD/MIT before even "think about using RIOT",  will contribute back to
the RIOT codebase.
But if we can lure companies to actively use RIOT, this may gain the
visibility in serious markets and promote RIOT as the "Product" of
choice for the IoT.
Still I'm a little bit sceptical if a license change will result in the
desired pull effect.

In this context I'm in favour of an Apache like license over BSD/MIT.

Best regards,
Martin
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Re: [riot-devel] [riot-users] Switch to BSD?

[René Kijewski]

(( Sorry for x-posting, I assumed we'd talk on users@riot-os :) ))

Am Wed, 3 Dec 2014 22:59:40 +0100
schrieb Emmanuel Baccelli :

> 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.  

Hi,

BSD is one of the most useless, outdated licenses there is. You give away all
your rights to the code up to the point where you are sued because you use the
code that you wrote.

Any enterprise who claims that they would like RIOT OS to switch to a BSD-style
license is no gain for the community. They simply would like to rip off the
actual contributors.

Opposed to that the Apache License was written by people who actually knew what
they were doing, and the is core of the Android OS, which one can consider 
fairly
successful, seeing that it is currently the most prevalent OS, used by many many
small and giant enterprises.

I am not opposed to relicensing to Apache 2.0 [1], I would welcome it. Actually
I already said a year ago that we should use the Apache License instead of 
LGPL. ;-)

But if you want to discard all the rights to your code, then at least use the
MIT license. The name is clear instead of the having to specify which of the
four different flavors of the license you mean, and MIT is much more often used
in new project. [2]

Best regards
René

[1]: http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0.html

[2]: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/04/18/github_licensing_study/
Disclaimer: "… his study was by no means scientific, nor was his data set 
complete …"

-- 
“Everything not saved will be lost”
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