Re: Netatalk and OpenSSL licencing
On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 09:54:05AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote:
> All licenses have "reimplementation waste" issues, in some form or
> another. Copyright law guarantees this.
At varying degrees; among free licenses, the GPL has some of the most
severe, and that's completely by design. I don't like forcing people to
waste their time reimplementing code I've written, so I don't tend to
put my work under the GPL.
I understand how copyleft ensures that you can reintegrate changes. It does
this, very deliberately, at the cost of other rewriting due to forced license
incompatibility. This is a tradeoff. It's a functional tradeoff, one which
I'm not condemning at all; but it does have two sides. In exchange for its
benefits, it also causes waste for people dealing with cases like Netatalk,
with free but GPL-incompatible licenses.
I don't think I've said anything new or strange about the GPL--it causes
rewriting, it's designed to do so, and I think it's fair to acknowledge that.
--
Glenn Maynard
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