Picking a license

[Paul Boddie]

On 14 Mai, 19:00, Patrick Maupin <pmau... at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Would you have agreed had he had said that "MatLab's license doesn't
> do much good" and assigned the same sort of meaning to that statement,
> namely that the MatLab license prevented enough motivated people from
> freely using MatLab in ways that were important to them?  Obviously,
> it was important enough to enough people that they went and built the
> GPLed Octave software, which now emulates MatLab very closely.

I don't need to answer your question. It's obvious that the licence
doesn't do much good when people seek to create a platform which is
genuinely and irrevocably open as a response. That they have done so
using the GPL pretty much sinks the previous ridiculous statement
about the GPL, too, unless Octave is somehow a bad thing (which is
what a certain vendor of proprietary statistics software would have
you believe about a certain widely-used statistical analysis tool).
Although people can argue that usage of the GPL prevents people from
potentially contributing because they would not be able to sell
proprietary versions of the software, it has been in no way
demonstrated to be universally true that such contributors would
contribute more than those who do so because of the copyleft
licensing. The creators of Octave are obviously not willing to create
(or help create) another system with all the proprietary limitations
of MatLab, and why should they be willing? The production of a
different "proprietary flavour" of MatLab wouldn't be beneficial to
them at all - it might even be detrimental to their project - and
might only be marginally beneficial, at best, to existing MatLab
customers.

[PySide]

> Just as there are a lot of proprietary programs that are relatively
> useless and *won't* have any GPLed versions written, nobody's going to
> waste time rewriting a marginally useful GPLed library just to put a
> permissive license on it, either.

Unless they really want to release (or encourage the creation of)
proprietary software, which is precisely what PySide is all about.
(And PyQt is not "marginally useful" - it is a widely-used and widely
well-regarded library.) And this apparent overriding need to support
proprietary solutions results in different strategies, such as with
the Chandler project: because the OSAF wanted to be able to sell
proprietary solutions but didn't own all the code, they decided to
pick only permissively licensed software for the components of the
solution, resulting in a lot of extra effort expended in getting their
user interface toolkit up to scratch. You can make your own mind up
about whether that was a sensible strategy.

Usually, however, most people wanting to write proprietary software
cannot be bothered to do the work to replicate an existing GPL-
licensed solution (or even to significantly improve permissively
licensed solutions). They instead appeal to people to release already-
mature permissively licensed software, typically waiting for someone
with enough money or manpower to do most of the work for them. Again,
this is precisely why PySide appeals to a certain audience.

Paul