Re: Mauve license

[Stuart Ballard <stuart dot a dot ballard at gmail dot com>]

(this is going to show up in the wrong place in the thread - for some
reason I can see mails showing up in the archives but I'm not
receiving them myself till much later, so I don't have this one myself
to respond to yet)

Andrew Haley wrote:
>  > but costing us contributors.
>
> This part is the mystery.  If, as you say, there's no practical reason
> why anyone would *want* to take Mauve proprietary, why does it matter
> that Mauve is GPL?

There are quite a few reasons, some logical, some not, why people
won't contribute to GPL projects.

Some corporations have policies prohibiting employees from looking at
GPL code. I don't believe there's any *good* reason for an
organization to have such a policy, but some do. It appears there's at
least one contributor on the Harmony list who is unable to look at
Classpath code for this reason. Some corporations may have weaker
policies that would still prohibit employees from actually writing GPL
code on company time.

Some people see the GPL as an endorsement of a political position they
don't agree with and won't work on software licensed under it for that
reason.

Some people philosophically oppose the idea of copyleft and don't want
their work under such a license.

The Apache organization has policies against distributing GPL code and
I believe also against requiring it as a dependency. (Even if everyone
at Apache could be persuaded that changing this was a good idea, their
procedures for doing so seem to take a while). A test suite isn't
strictly a dependency but I think they'd at least have strong
reservations against making it official policy that if you're writing
tests for Harmony that test public APIs they should go in this GPL
project.

Another reason I feel test suites shouldn't be copyleft is similar to
RMS's reasoning about Ogg: the greatest benefit to Free Software is
obtained by having all implementations be compatible and compatible
with the existing proprietary solution to help people escape the trap.
The best way to achieve that is by getting good tests as widely
disseminated and used as possible (analagous to getting Ogg support as
widely used as possible to help people escape the mp3 trap).

(another email I'm seeing in the archives but haven't received myself
- Andrius's point about the OMG tests. I believe it should be possible
to convert the license back to LGPL if we have permission from the
copyright holders of all the code that was changed since, which would
then mean that as long as the OMG tests are self-contained, they could
be linked happily with a non-copyleft Mauve even if they themselves
are still copyleft).

Stuart.

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