Kawa (re-)licensing

[Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>]

Various people have asked about the current license of Kawa.
Advantages of the current license include:
- Clearly Free, open-source, GPL-compatible.
- Compatible with proprietary code.
- Encourages people to submit patches back to the main codebase.
- Provides a motivation for companies to negotiate a commercial
license, which provides funding for Kawa.

Disadvantages include:
- The license is unusual/complex.
- Some projects may be reluctant to use Kawa code, especially
if they use a license less restrictive than the GPL or
incompatible with it, such as Apache.
- Some contributors may be reluctant to contribute - i.e. why
should they give me their work?

I'm not sure what the best thing for Kawa is.  Comments?

I'm thinking as an experient to try a hybrid:
- For Kawa "releases" use a simple MIT/BSD/X11-style license:
  http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
  This would apply to (say) kawa-1.8.tar.gz (.jar) as downloadable
  from ftp.gnu.org.
- Keep the current license for "unreleased" code - i.e. the CVS sources,
snapshots, and alpha/beta versions.

This doesn't help with the complexity issue (arguably it makes it
worse), but may reduce the other disadvantages of the current
license, while maintaining the advantages.

Opinions?
--
	--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com   http://per.bothner.com/