On Sat, Nov 11, 2000 at 12:33:10PM +1100, Jeff Waugh wrote:
> Morning all,
>
> 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?
That is two questions disguised as one. The GPL defines ``Free Software'',
Open Source co-opts various licences to its cause. While I would
prefer to believe that eventually all useful software will be GPL'd
Apache stands as testimony that licence isn't a factor once it is
suitably `open'.
> 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?
No, there will always be authors (e.g. raster) who want to recognised
by their work (the licence of Enlightenment is BSD-with-ad-clause).
So non-GPL won't disappear. Other bigger exampels are Bind, OpenLDAP,
OpenSSL, Apache and most MTAs (Mail Transer Agents) except Exim.
More concerning than GPL vs non-GPL is how is how a lot of major
pieces of infrastructure have their own licence. The examples you
cite below appear to be following this trend. It'd be an interesting
study for someone suitably intrigued by this phenomena to look at it.
> 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.
This is the principle reason I've avoided PHP. With so many reasonable
scripting languages popping up, why settle for a non-GPL one.
> * 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.
It terms of development talent pool I think you'll find it matters very
little, currently. Most developers tend to look for useful software with
reasonable (read easily comprehendable) design that they can work on.
Licence issues are mostly secondary. You do get some noticible exceptions
to this rule though (e.g. Alan Cox) whose, as I understand it, decision to
work on the Linux kernel was principaly because it was under the GPL.
I believe that in future more developers will be conscious of the licence
software is under -- I think not GPL'ing your software will start to
exclude you from a large talent pool (and also a good body of code) which
will cause yor potential project to proceed less rapidly (if at all).
Regards,
Anand
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