on Mon, Oct 22, 2001 at 02:20:34AM -0500, Jim Choate (ravage@einstein.ssz.com) wrote:
On Sun, 21 Oct 2001, Karsten M. Self wrote:
Nutshell argument: license interactions are factorial.
How so? Proof?
Sorry. Combinatorial. Not quite as extreme. From a legal standpoint, interactions of all combinations of licenses must be considered. The interesting cases usually reduce to a much smaller number. The trend in free software licensing has been strong reluctance to accepting novel licenses. A strong case for benefit is generally requested, many licenses boil down to ego, corporate politics, or failure to understand free software / open source concepts -- the licenses simply aren't either, again, Plan 9 is a case in point. There's also been a tendency among major projects to seek compatibility (usually through dual or multiple licensing) with the GPL, Sun and Mozilla being two cases in point.
Interaction complexity reduces overall value of a codebase, and tends to marginalize minority licenses.
Interaction for who, the author or the user?
Interaction between licenses. It's more overhead for the developer to deal with. Case in point: Tom's Root/Boot. GNU/Linux on a floppy, 1.77 MB. Licenses themselves comprised some 50KB, significant for this task. Terms for compliance that require license and binary to occupy the same media in use are not acceptable for the technical task (fortunately none of the major free software licenses require this). OpenBSD has eliminated several packages from Donald J. Bernstein due to his licensing clauses, despite their being technically excellent (if non standards compliant) software. Any number of proposals cross the OSI's door which exclude specific types of use or transfer. It's too much overhead for developers to consider most of these, they'll stick to a half-dozen or so known (or highly similar) licenses. Again, GPL, LGPL, BSD/MIT, and Mozilla cover a broad range of strategic interests.
All license start out in the minority. It's a competition in a way.
What are you competing for? What characteristics of a license will "win" the competition? This isn't software domination, it's more a protocol for collaborative development. Once you've got that nailed down, stop dicking with the damned lawyers, and start writing code. Peace. -- Karsten M. Self <kmself@ix.netcom.com> http://kmself.home.netcom.com/ What part of "Gestalt" don't you understand? Home of the brave http://gestalt-system.sourceforge.net/ Land of the free Free Dmitry! Boycott Adobe! Repeal the DMCA! http://www.freesklyarov.org Geek for Hire http://kmself.home.netcom.com/resume.html