[It's perhaps not quite "kosher" for people to post my
private email to a list I don't subscribe to, and then
for people to respond to that email without cc'ing me.
To set the record straight, I've subscribed, for now.]
Gianugo Rabellino wrote:
> heesh... isn't that funny? GPL as of today is the best way to make
> commercial software in an open-sourceish way. I'm wondering if RMS is
> realizing how he's actually *promoting* commercial software instead
> than free: yeah, you have "free" as in speech, but if you want to
> speak you have to pay admittance. Oh well...
I don't know the point of this, except as a rather mushy
attach on my character. I have contributed to GNU and other
Free Software since the late 1980's and for most of my
professional career, and for most of that time I could
have made a lot more money working on commercial software.
Making the same software available under multiple licenses
is not uncommon, and I don't see why you're complaining about
me allowing a commercial license as an option - as other
companies do. (If you have an objection to proprietary
software, then I don't understand how you can object to the GPL.)
> No way, the point here is virality. This has been discussed at length
> in other places so I won't delve into it, but the point is that if we
> are to use GPL (or any GPL derived) Java code, all our codebase would
> become instantly GPL because of virality.
This may be true for GPL-licensed code, but the Kawa (Qexo)
license is only viral if you modify Qexo (and don't pay for a
commercial license).
> This doesn't happen for Sun classes.
Yes, but only because you can't modify the Sun classes.
My suggestion: Don't incorporate Qexo into the Apache CVS
tree, but treat it as an optional external library, just
like you would treat Sun's libraries (except that most of
those aren't optional, of course). Note that the Kawa
license gives you permission to redistribute binaries
(in this case the kawa .jar file), even if you don't
redistribute source, though you can of course do that as
well.
Note the distiction between Apache code *depending on*
Qexo, vs *incorportating* Qexo. The former has none of
the "virality" concerns of the latter. And I don't see any
difference in principle between Apache code depending
on my classes and depending on Sun's classes, and
since Apache does the latter, there can be no objection.
--
--Per Bothner
[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://per.bothner.com/
