A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 10, 2011 17:05 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: A Plumber's Wish List for Linux by jra
Parent article: A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Choosing any GPL license isolates you from a large part of the community. I think describing it as anti-social is rather extreme.

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A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 10, 2011 17:45 UTC (Mon) by jra (subscriber, #55261) [Link] (4 responses)

I'm sorry, I didn't define my terms correctly - that's my fault.

When I use the word community, I'm considering the GPL-code-writing community - that's the group I feel a part of. There are other communities, and a broader FLOSS community using different licenses, but they're not ones that I would chose so I don't feel as much a part of them.

Within that narrower definition (although it is 70% of all Free Software out there) then chosing an XX-only license is an anti-social act, as it prevents wider reuse within GPL projects, which IMHO is the purpose of that license.

A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 10, 2011 18:41 UTC (Mon) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (3 responses)

It's a community that's based on a large number of non-GPL components (plus one fairly significant GPLv2-only component). If you define "Community" in such a way that, say, X.org isn't part of the community, I think you're aligning yourself pretty differently to the majority of people contributing to free software development.

A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 10, 2011 21:20 UTC (Mon) by jra (subscriber, #55261) [Link] (2 responses)

Maybe so, but that's the community I feel the most affinity with (the GPL software producing community).

A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 13, 2011 16:35 UTC (Thu) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

'Antisocial' refers to society as a whole, not just the community you personally feel the most affinity with.

A Plumber's Wish List for Linux

Posted Oct 16, 2011 18:01 UTC (Sun) by obi (guest, #5784) [Link]

As it's supposed to be a community, you could simply ask for this specific code to be released GPLv2+.

Or even better, understand their apprehensions about not automatically trusting all future GPL versions, and ask for this code to be released v2 + v3 only.

If people would ask me to release some of my code under an additional or more liberal license so it can be reused I doubt I'd deny them.

So just ask in a friendly way.