On Fri, 2006-08-25 at 19:40 -0400, Joe wrote: > Jan Niklas Fingerle wrote: > > Hi, > > > > Es sprach mike bayer: > > > the word on the street is that if you want commercial enterprises to > > > use your software, if theres *anything* remotely GPL-ish about it they > > > wont go near it... > > > > that must be the reason why no company at all is using linux. Yes > > you're right, companies can be quite, well, schizophrenic (at least) > > about licenses: If it's a well-known tool, nobody really cares, but > > if it's something unknown, the license becomes an issue: I've had an > > experience, where a MIT'ed project wasn't used because there was nobody > > that you could _buy_ a license from ...
> I didn't want to enter the fray, but ... Jan, IMHO the difference is > not that Linux is well known. It's that most companies using Linux, > even if they have some employees that end up hacking it here or there > for the companies' own use, do not intend to become Linux distributors > or to start their own Linux fork. And how is that different from a web framework? The idea of forking one and expecting to make a profit is pretty unrealistic (word on the street is that Python already has too many <wink>). More likely, hosted commercial services built on top of them would be the plan, in which case since the software isn't distributed, the GPL doesn't apply to any changes they might make. > OTOH, with libraries and smaller > application software, the possibility of improving them and maybe even > trying to make a buck with them is a realistic consideration, even if > the company isn't directly in the software business. I don't think this applies in the arena under discussion, and even if it did, I think it provides as much of an argument *for* using the GPL as for not. One thing that has never been adequately explained in these discussions is how the forking of a project by a commercial entity who has no plans of releasing source back to the project benefits the original project in any way. In fact it carries the potential of harming the original project, as forking often does, all licensing issues aside. > Trac was released under the GPL prior to 0.9, but they chose to change > to a modified BSD (and most of these arguments were discussed in their > mailing list at the time the change was considered). I'd say it was > already fairly well known at the time, but I believe (anecdotally) that > it's done even better since then. Not only is that information anecdotal, there's nothing showing that the change in licensing had any part in it (although I'm sure it didn't hurt them any either). I'm not aware of any commercial entities selling modified copies of Trac either, so it appears to have been a fairly pointless move. To sum up my thinking on the entire GPL licensing issue wrt the web: completely irrelevant. It simply doesn't apply in 99% of the deployment scenarios. If company X won't use your web framework because it's GPL, I doubt it's a loss to anyone but company X anyway so I don't know why anyone would lose a bit of sleep over it. Regards, Cliff -- --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TurboGears" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/turbogears -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
