Picking a license

[Patrick Maupin]

On May 14, 1:07 pm, Paul Boddie <p... at boddie.org.uk> wrote:
> 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.

That statement was made in the context of why Carl doesn't use GPL-
licensed *libraries*.  He and I have both explained the difference
between libraries and programs multiple times, not that you care.

> 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.

As I have said before, the availability of multiple (but not too
many!) licenses is a great thing, because each contributor can decide
how he wants to license his creation.  Finding the right license to
contribute under can only enhance the commons.

> 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?

I don't presume to know their motivations, or how the license got
chosen.  However, once it was under the GPL and there were multiple
contributors, it would certainly be difficult to relicense any other
way.

> 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.

I personally can't see any realistic chance of detriment.  How could a
proprietary clone hope to compete against free software on one side
and real matlab on the other side?  That's a no-win position, so I
wouldn't expect to see any proprietary clones.

> [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.

How does recreating something marginally useful encourage proprietary
software?  That's very confusing.

> which is precisely what PySide is all about.

No, PySide is about non-GPL software, and is released under a license
that even RMS recognizes as "free", and it is certainly not of
marginal utility.

> (And PyQt is not "marginally useful" - it is a widely-used and widely
> well-regarded library.)

Well, we agree on that.  But I don't know why you're trying to claim I
said PyQt was only marginally useful.

> 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.

Large, high-risk projects are often going to fail and there will
always be some decisions that are easy to second-guess, correctly or
not.  In any case, if the goal was a particular method to get a ROI,
it may have been that they wouldn't have been able to do that at all
with the GPL, either.

> 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).

Usually, most people wanting to write software can't be bothered to do
the work.  That's nothing new.  Yet occasionally people do some work,
and some projects make progress.

> 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.

Well, personally, I'm still waiting for someone to finish the Hurd,
but I've always been led to believe that laziness is a virtue in a
programmer.

> Again,
> this is precisely why PySide appeals to a certain audience.

Certainly, the audience for a library is going to be people who both
find it interesting and find that it meets their licensing
requirements.  Nothing new about that.

Regards,
Pat