Re: License wars

[Hugues Talbot <Hugues dot Talbot at csiro dot au>]

Dear Alexander,

There is no point in getting angry like that. What you call
`collective work' is not what the FSF defines as collective, 
the LGPL lumps a great deal under the term `derivative work'. 
That term has not been tested in court with respect to the LGPL 
so there is no certainty about who is right, you or the FSF 
laywers. Straight logic does not apply necessarily in court 
decisions. A lot of people may not like it but that's the way 
it is. Whether or not the FSF has a leg to stand on is open 
to debate but this is not the point.

Yes I agree with you that the LGPL restricts more than the CPL
or the BSD or the Mozilla license, that much is obvious. My 
point is that the LGPL is a strong license which may not be
as business-friendly as other licenses, but it does have some
bite. My impression is that the CPL is unenforceable whereas
the LGPL has been enforced successfully several times already.
Most recently there was a article in Forbes magazine about it.

It's a bit like patents. There is zero point in taking a patent
if you are not willing to go to court to defend it. Same here.
If you are quite prepared for anybody to do anything they want
with your code then the choice of license does not matter.
If you want to defend your code against exploitation then 
as an individual or a collection of individuals with little means
there is little choice, and the CPL is probably not one of them,
although I would welcome news to the contrary.

Note that the BSD license is very business-friendly and has been
actually court-tested successfully, something the (L)GPL cannot
claim. However as you know the BSD license protects little.

Finally if the copyright holders of the pthread-win32 library 
decide the LGPL is unacceptable they can change it, but this is 
not for me or you to have the last word.

If you are trying to have a constructive debate about this 
treating people like idiots is not the way to go.



--------
Hugues Talbot, CSIRO Mathematical & Information Sciences
Locked Bag 17, Building E6B, Macquarie University  North Ryde  
NSW  2113  Australia           Ph: 61 2 9325 3208 Fax: 61 2 9325 3200

63% of all statistics are made up on the spot.