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no; it's free software.

no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 28, 2004 18:48 UTC (Wed) by mattdm (subscriber, #18)
In reply to: Is it gonna be a bitkeeper? by rknop
Parent article: OLS: An introduction to Conary

It's released under the OSI-approved IBM CPL, which is basically GPL-like with some additional patent-related stuff.


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no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 29, 2004 8:04 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

CPL is yet another GPL-incompatible license.

When will you people understand? There are only 3 free software licenses to choose from: X/MIT, GPL, and LGPL. Anything else is harmful to the free software movement: any marginal gains are completely overshadowed by license incompatibilities, user confusion, and legal risks.

no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 29, 2004 8:35 UTC (Thu) by ekj (subscriber, #1524) [Link]

I think you're forgetting some of the variants of BSD-licensing, some of which is GPL compatible, (in the sense that you can take code under that license, and legally incorporate it as part of a GPL project) it's hard to see how exactly that is harming free software.

I agree with you that being "different" in itself is a huge minus for a license, even when the terms by themselves are acceptable, there's always the issues of user confusion and incompatibilities between different licenses.

no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 29, 2004 10:32 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

Please, check the link to the licensing discussion. I've put it in my post for a reason.

BTW, I forgot to add fragmentation (as opposed to diversity) to the list of harms license incompatibility brings.

on overlooked links

Posted Jul 30, 2004 21:28 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]

Please, check the link to the licensing discussion. I've put it in my post for a reason.

It would be good if that reason were evident from the post itself. In this case, you just hyperlinked the wrong text. The text X/MIT, GPL, and LGPL does not say "licensing discussion." It suggests a link or links to descriptions of three licenses.

In this case, the text There are only 3 free software licenses would have been better text to hyperlink, and "as discussed here" would be even better.

I don't know about you, but I virtually never click on every hyperlink in a document. I have to have some clue it's something I want to read.

on overlooked links

Posted Aug 3, 2004 14:56 UTC (Tue) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

You're right, my links could have been more obvious.

I don't know about you, but I virtually never click on every hyperlink in a document. I have to have some clue it's something I want to read.

When I'm interested in the subject, I usually dig deep enough to understand the point. When I'm not interested, I don't bother to read comments at all.

no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 29, 2004 13:16 UTC (Thu) by mattdm (subscriber, #18) [Link]

When will you people understand? [emphasis added]

Who are the "you people" you are talking about? It's an OSI-approved license, for goodness sakes.

I would really appreciate it if people would keep these ideological discussions off of the LWN comments. It's good that these discussions exist, but this isn't a useful place for them. Write a guest editorial if you want, but otherwise, post to slashdot or kuro5hin or somewhere. (Or perhaps better in this case, contact the OSI/Debian and try to convince them.) Let's keep the comments here to points of fact. (Is that an official rule? No. It'd just be nice.)

no; it's free software.

Posted Jul 29, 2004 16:12 UTC (Thu) by angdraug (subscriber, #7487) [Link]

Who are the "you people" you are talking about?

You in particular, and other people who shrug off license incompatibility as a non-issue.

It's an OSI-approved license, for goodness sakes.

OSI isn't God, they aren't even omniscient.

Even worse, it is their practice of blindly approving problematic licenses that created this problem in the first place. It all started when they let Netscape get away with MPL instead of convincing them to use GPL. Isn't it ironic that Mozilla project was eventually dual-licensed under GPL anyway?

I would really appreciate it if people would keep these ideological discussions off of the LWN comments.

It is not merely ideological as long as it has far-reaching practical consequences. I apologize for inflammatory tone of my comment, but I still think that usefulness of a license chosen by a new free software project is relevant to the discussion of this project.

no; it's free software.

Posted Aug 6, 2004 12:52 UTC (Fri) by dash2 (guest, #11869) [Link]

Gordon Bennett. Even the Gnu people themselves encourage Perl developers use the Perl license rather than the pure GPL.

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