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Technology Stocks : LINUX -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: JC Jaros who wrote (1920)	12/12/1999 5:10:00 PM
From: Mitch Blevins	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2617

What's wrong with the Perl license? Nothing at all. I like the Artistic license and think that for a given piece of software, it is more beneficial than either Traditional Copyright or GPL (both for consumers and developers). The problem is, how do you convince people to develop under the Artistic license? And, is there a danger that developers would add to a program licensed under the Artistic license and then re-release it as either Traditional Copyright or GPL? This property is a trait of Public Domain, Artistic, and BSD (new, sans-advertising-clause) licenses. Depending on your point of view, it can be seen as either a great strength or a fatal flaw. The strength is that it allows the greatest amount of freedom over what can be done with the code. The weakness is that it is vulnerable to "assimilation" by other licenses such as Traditional Copyright, GPL, or SCSL. For example, suppose you develop a program called "foo-tastic" which is the next killer-app. You decide to release it to the Public Domain so as to get the widest distribution of your app. Then, Richard Stallman comes along and adds command-line editing to your program by linking it with the GNU readline library, which is a non-trivial addition and makes the program much better. The problem is, that it is now re-licensed under the GPL and called "GNU-tastic", and no longer has all the freedoms you initially wanted people to have with your code. People can still get your original code without the readline capabilities, but they have to use the GNU version if they want the enhanced capabilities. Likewise, Microsoft comes along and adds proprietary extensions to your killer app, and calls it "ActasticX". MS never releases the source code to their new extensions, distributing their version as binary-only. Also, Sun decides to extend your program by embedding a Javascript interpreter into it (SunTastic?). They release this new version under the SCSL. Under all the above situations, your "foo-tastic" program has been assimilated and fragmented into competing programs. Each of these extensions to your program is better than the original program, but you cannot get a version that has all these improvements in the same program because the new licenses are incompatible. The GPL solves this problem by requiring any extensions to the program also be licensed under the GPL. The downside is that this discourages commercial extensions from being added (which might be useful). The SCSL also solves this problem by requiring extensions by distributed under the SCSL. Commercial extensions are allowed provided that the commercial entity is willing to pay royalties to Sun (or whoever) for the right to sell the extended product. Traditional Copyright (TC) solves the fragmentation problem by simply disallowing any extensions by other developers or companies. The original developer retains complete control. Other companies can provide commercial extensions to the program if they can get a licensing agreement from the original author, but barriers are high to this happening. So, which is better? (PD, TC, GPL, SCSL) I dunno. I guess it depends on your point of view... better for the developer? Better for the consumers? Better in that it produces the best software? There are success stories for each type of license... Perl (PD or Artistic), Linux (GPL), MSOffice (TC). Since the SCSL is a very new license, it is still too early to tell if any success stories develop from it. StarOffice is nice, but it was developed under TC, not SCSL... so we might need more time to see the utility/success of the SCSL. It is interesting that Perl has not fallen prey to being "assimilated" by other licenses. I think this has to do with the fact that it is essential that it is able to run all existing Perl programs out in the world, so extensions to the language are less likely. An example of software that DID fall prey to assimilation is BSD (with a PD-type license) and Next. FreeBSD was extended by Next successfully to make a nice product, but because it was assimilated into a Traditional Copyright by Next, the effort spent enhancing BSD was wasted and the Next code became an evolutionary dead-end after the company went under. It could be argued that this didn't hurt anything, because you can still get FreeBSD under the original license. But it seems to be such a waste of effort. Would the Next code still be around and usable if FreeBSD was under a non-assimilatable license such as SCSL or GPL? Or would Next simply not have bothered to work on it in the first place if it was forced into something other than TC? There are so many variables in judging the utility of these licenses that the best measure might simply be the popularity of these licenses... which produces the most high-quality software. So far, it appears that TC is in the lead. :( -Mitch