Morning all,
Here's a question I've wanted to put to SLUGgers for a while - I just
haven't had the time to think about it recently. :)
It stems from some of the things going on in the Free Software world at the
moment, and the phrase, "Interoperability favours quality." I've heard this
argument used numerous times to rationalise the development of software such
as Samba, dosemu, Wine and just recently, software developed by ActiveState
to allow cross-platform developers to integrate (quality) languages such as
Perl and Python into .NET.
a) Is GPL-compatibility the crux of cooperative Free Software
development, and can we achieve "World Domination" without it?
b) Will non-GPL-compatible software disappear into obscurity as
developers find software that *can* be integrated, included and hacked
upon within strong GPL projects?
A few examples to whet your appetite:
* PHP4 was relicenced and is now incompatible with the GPL. You cannot
link or include GPL software with PHP4. Whilst many developers are
sticking with PHP3 (definitely of lesser quality than version 4), because
of this, PHP4 is still dominating.
* Python has been in licence hell recently. Nearly 'nuff said, apart from
the fact that it has been incompatible with the GPL. This is being
actively discussed though, so there may be a happy ending. ;)
* Mozilla.org has started their attempt to dual licence the entire code
base of Mozilla as MPL/GPL, so other projects can take advantage of the
code therein. The bleedingly obvious case of this (now) is the Gnome
project using Gecko as a standard part of Nautilus and Evolution.
* libcurl is a library with great potential, used for making http/ftp
connections, etc. It has had a number of security problems recently,
however. It's currently under the MPL, and the author stands fairly
strongly against the GPL or LGPL. I know of at least two GPL projects
(one of them being the Gnome project, which you could hardly claim as a
small contender) that would benefit greatly from the use of libcurl -
increasing its use immeasurably, which would lead to improvement and
developer visibility.
Obviously, it's the authors right to licence their software as they please.
My question isn't aimed at changing this, rather, to see what the effects of
having a non-GPL-compatible licence are.
- Jeff
-- [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------- http://linux.conf.au/ --
Ye shall be cursed to fall in love so easily, and yet be so
cold of heart as never to express it.
--
SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/
More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
