Is this a blunder, or just too subtle for me?

Posted Jul 27, 2007 9:31 UTC (Fri) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943)
In reply to: Is this a blunder, or just too subtle for me? by khim
Parent article: SugarCRM goes to GPLv3

khim wrote:

LWN is "private endeavour" as far as the code is concerned, there are nothing to accept or deny, it's just truth.

My usual response to tiresome definitional games is to descend down the abstraction ladder and talk about something more specific, so let's do that here.

I had thought that LWN is build on homebuilt Web-app code, which you say is not entirely the case. OK, but then my concern applies more rather than less:

The only sense of "private endeavour" that struck me as meaningful in this context is "entirely internal project". Obviously, LWN is not (other than in the form-over-substance sense that I believe you're advocating): Although its foundational code does not get distributed, all the functionality that in pre-ASP days required distribution is deployed and used by public users. That is "private" only in a deliberately blinkered sense of the term (and your polemically labelling such things "private forks" should fool very few, this late in the game).

If, on the one hand, some portion of LWN's third-party code is under simple permissive licences, then none of the above matters at all, as to that code, since the authors intended all manner of usage including proprietary forks, anyway. If, on the other hand, some code is copylefted, then odds are that those codebases' authors intended for public exploitation of their code to trigger copyleft reciprocity obligations, and merely made an (obsolete) assumption that such exploitation would entail distribution. I know from damned sure that the licences' authors intended that, because I asked.

Frankly, it's abundantly obvious that you know all that, and merely dislike it, presumably finding it inconvenient. Sorry to hear about your personal problem, but kindly just step out of the way while other people update their assumptions, and their licensing practices to match.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com