Per Bothner wrote:
[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.]
Sorry, didn't know that, and besides (see below) this wasn't meant as a communication to you in particular.
> 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.)
I think there is a misunderstanding here, and being a non native English speaker the mistake might well be on my part. This wasn't at all an attack to you and to what you want to do, it was just a rant on the GPL (I'm a strong BSD supporter). FSF was raised on the principle that information wants to be free and that human knowledge (what on the commercial side is called IP) belongs to all of us: they produced a license that was severely limiting other's freedom, since virality means that you're just "free to be free", whatevere "free" means in GNU-land. Their point was to disallow software from becoming proprietary, yet this license is actually used as a trojan horse by people that (in full right!) want to have a commercial return from their effort. So i find pretty funny the fact that it's not difficult to produce proprietary software with a foundation on a GPL base: as long as you want to pay for it you can easily forget about the GPL philosophy.
From a social point of view this is interesting: most BSD guys, like me, have a strong belief on Open Source as a gift to humanity at large (a gift is a gift: no strings attached), and have a deeper trust on the human society since we believe that our efforts might be economically recognized by people (and companies) with good will and good faith.
This said, with my commercial hat on and forgetting about the OSS movement and its social implications, I think that dual licensing is a good strategy so I'm not blaming you at all.
> 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 is interesting and I didn't actually know about it (my bad): I will ask the Apache community about this variation to see if it's enough to have it included in the Apache CVS.
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.
The point is different: we have to make sure that ASF code depending on the Kawa library will not automatically become GPL. This is what happens with all GPL (or GPL variations) that I know of, but it will be interesting to see if this applies to your modification in particular. Also, the virality of GPL is recursive so if Kawa (as a java application) relies on GPL code, then it's automatically GPL, no matter how you label it: this is something that needs investigation too. Thanks however for your information: I will try to understand where we are standing from a legal point of view.
Ciao,
-- Gianugo Rabellino Pro-netics s.r.l. http://www.pro-netics.com
