ANN: Twisted 0.16.0: Licenses and Open Source don't conflict.

Brad Bollenbach bbollenbach at shaw.ca
Thu Apr 11 18:19:58 EDT 2002


In article <12bb92e6.0204091223.738e0798 at posting.google.com>, Peter Olsen wrote:
> I think that, for my purposes, licensing is not worth my effort or
> my users' time.  But if you want to license your Open Source software,
> be my guest.

This doesn't actually make sense. To call software "Open Source" is to
acknowledge it as being distributed under a license that is defined as
compatible with what Richard Stallman calls "Free Software". So you
don't have the "choice" of licensing Open Source software. It got to be
called "Open Source" *because* of the license you've already chosen for
it.

And, FWIW, thinking that you're doing your users a favour by monitoring
who's using which version of what, and in what kind of environment
(commercial vs. non-commercial) is, at best, dependant on the types of
users, and, at worst, and absolutely disasterous idea. If they're 
"end-user" types, you might legimitately be providing some capabilities 
they want, but adopting this scheme for Open Source Hacker types will 
just reduce your user-base by an order of magnitude or more.

My $0.02,

Brad



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