Peter Åstrand wrote: > Someone has to be first, right? One main reason why we created > TigerVNC was that we should be able to work faster, move faster. So it > might not be surprising that the "slower" projects have not yet migrated. Be careful. One of those "slower" projects is the very one you're trying to siphon performance enhancements off of. Our project chose to remain with GPL v2 not because of slowness but because we didn't like the provisions of GPL v3. I suspect that many projects have made this same evaluation.
As far as working faster, quality takes time. TurboVNC, lest it be forgotten, has been shipped as an enterprise-quality product by a Fortune 500 company for the last 3 years. There is an unbelievable amount of work that has to take place before an OSS project can be productized at that level, including a massive amount of quality assurance. Also, the more parties that get involved, the slower a project becomes. > I respect that, but the motivation for doing this is to prevent people > from using the code in a way that we don't but which is still allowed > by v2. Say, IGEL. OK, so can you explain the loophole in GPL v2 that they exploited? > The announcement is at http://news.samba.org/announcements/samba_gplv3/. Their talking points are ripped almost straight from the FSF's talking points. I don't see any independent reasoning as to why they were concerned about GPL v2. > We at Cendio have also a long experience with both proprietary and > open source, and we are of course doing all this for commercial > interests. We do not believe, however, that "proprietary plug-ins" is > the only way to make money. I didn't say it was the only way, but it is a way that a lot of companies use and have used, including Sun. > As far as I understand, this policy is not new to v3; it's been in the > FSF FAQ for many years and applies to v2 as well. We've had this discussion at length on the TightVNC list before, so I won't repeat it here. In a nutshell, different lawyers disagree on this. The OSI, for instance, doesn't believe that, if the GPL were tested in court, it would even apply to static linking, much less dynamic. There are a lot of grey areas to the argument, though. TurboJPEG, for instance, is distributed with both closed source and open source versions of the same DLL so that GPL v2 applications don't "require" the closed source version in order to run. What concerns me most is not the above cases, however, but rather linking against proprietary SDK's. For instance, what if someone wanted to develop a TigerVNC Windows client that used the latest & greatest DirectX from Microsoft. GPL v3 does not allow them to do it, because since the latest DirectX isn't shipped with the O/S, it doesn't fall under the "system library" exception. Thus, GPL v3 would require the developer to distribute the new DirectX libraries along with their app, but since Microsoft's license prevents them from doing that, the two are in conflict. Additionally, I find the language in paragraph 1 of the GPL v3 which defines "corresponding source" to include "all the source code needed to generate, install, and (for an executable work) run the object code and to modify the work, including scripts to control those activities" to be somewhat draconian and open to all sorts of bad interpretations (for instance, if you require a newer version of Java to run your object code, does that mean you have to ship Java?) In general, I think that choosing GPL v3 is giving up some of our freedom in exchange for the promise of additional security. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Apps built with the Adobe(R) Flex(R) framework and Flex Builder(TM) are powering Web 2.0 with engaging, cross-platform capabilities. Quickly and easily build your RIAs with Flex Builder, the Eclipse(TM)based development software that enables intelligent coding and step-through debugging. Download the free 60 day trial. http://p.sf.net/sfu/www-adobe-com _______________________________________________ Tigervnc-devel mailing list Tigervnc-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tigervnc-devel
