Re: Mostly free software...

[Philip Hands <phil@hands.com>]

David Starner <dstarner98@aasaa.ofe.org> writes:

> Philip Hands wrote:
> > If they are doing commercial software, let them develop it
> > themselves, and stop trying to muddy the waters with almost-free
> > licenses that dupe people into doing their development for them.
> 
> "Dupe people"? The situation is totally clear. If people want to develop

OK, so in this particular case, that may have been a little harsh.

> for them, they can, knowing that their work will get used in a semi-free
> program. (Note the amount of work that went into BSD before it was freed
> from AT&T license entanglments, and probably before that was even
> thought of. They, too, knew what they were doing.) It's the developer's
> choice.

The KDE developers clearly didn't know what they were doing when they
failed to spot the problem with the Qt GPL conflict --- mostly because
they simply didn't worry about licenses until it was too late.

And the second wave of KDE developers were generally totally unaware
of the issues, because as far as they were concerned they were working
on GPLed code.

>From what I can gather there's nothing particularly awful about the
semi-free license in question (only having seen the brief description
on their web site), but I wouldn't like to see the software being used
to maintain the source for a major free software project (the Linux
kernel, say) because of the implicit approval that would give to
semi-free licensing.

It just seems like the start of a slippery slope to me.

Cheers, Phil.