Open Source Licence (LGPL or GPL)

[David Bovill]

Ken Ray wrote:
>>The only concern about PD I have is that it is just that: public 
>>domain. Anyone can take what we have and do whatever they want with 
>>it, including marketing it commercially. In other words, PD may be 
>>too a broad license. Do we care?
> 
> 
> No. If someone wants to take the MC IDE (MINUS the engine - since that's
> proprietary) and do something with it, more power to 'em. It's like
> trying to sell a car without an engine... 

Ken that's not the point. The only issue here is about user 
modifications of code and components and whether these are required by 
the licence to be submitted back to the project.

With a public domain style license such as the MIT licence they are not, 
which means that a company can use the MC IDE, or take code and 
components from the IDE, modify them with some lovely improvements and 
then protect the stack / code so that no-one else can benefit from these 
improvements. There are three ways people tend to take this:

	1) Some people consider this stealing free code donated by other people 
and then charging for it - like we do with the environment - and get all 
irate.

	2) Others take a pragmatic approach and look at which licence 
stimulates the evolution of (their) public code most.

	3) Others still take a competative approach and ask which license best 
supports the evolution of (their) public code in the face of competition 
with the commercial sector.

The only consideration I suspect interests this list is 2) - which 
approach stimulates the evolution of the IDE most. This is a long term 
consideration as in the short term all we are doing is maintaining a 
static IDE with a few tweaks here and there.

That is the thing about evolution and open source change happens by 
small incremental changes (save the odd Revolution :) which build on 
each other to make a big difference. The importance of each change is 
not noticed at the time.

I feel that this is important to our community because while we have one 
of the best tools on the market and probably the best user community, we 
have a problem evolving the contributions we make. How many people out 
there have been a little dissapointed after submitting a udeful 
contribution and finding that they less than they hoped in terms of user 
improvements?

I feel we have a chance to start in a small way to create an environment 
which addresses this with the MC IDE being made open source by Scott. I 
agree with Richard that we should start by just maintaining the IDE, but 
by learning from the open source community how best to do this, we are 
more likely to avoid this project stagnating into nothing more than a 
dead end archive, and give it a chance to evolve into something much 
more interesting. Choosing the right license is a part of this.

This just emphasises the importance of the choice (it is important even 
though most users don't really give a fig :) The argument regarding the 
choice between public domain (such as the MIT style open source 
initiative OSI licence) and the lesser GPL (LGPL) licence is all about 
which achieves this evolution most effectively.

Some (more recently) argue that the very restrictions (cohersion) in 
LGPL style licenses actually hinder the process by putting people off 
(notably companies that have a problem with the inability to protect 
their code improvements), others insist that without this the quality of 
the public code deteriorates over time. There is no consensus on this 
point - although I detect a slow shift in preference for public domain 
style licenses in the open source community.

I don't usually like long rants about licenses on public lists - so i 
hope my 2 cents worth hasn't bored everyone, and i'd usually recommend 
taking this sort of discussion off list into an interested subgroup 
(reporting back) - but Richard bullied me into this :)