[Drawkit] DrawKit licensing hassles

[Bill Dudney]

Before coming back to the OSX community I spent a bunch of time in the  
open source space.

While there are as many opinions as there are developers the Apache  
license seems to make it easier to build a developer community. If you  
want to have people contributing, Apache makes it easy. I can  
contribute to DrawKit and then get ROI on my contribution by using the  
library in my application, without additional expense of a license  
fee. I pay for my use by helping fix bugs etc.

If on the other hand you want to be the sole prop owner of the code  
and not have contributors (not that I'm suggest that is what you want)  
then a more restrictive license would be good. The owner of the code  
maintains exclusive control over the code and the community is built  
up as 'users' not contributors. This is the model followed by JBoss  
and other high profile open source projects. Nothing wrong with this  
approach, it is just more focused on building a company around the  
open source project than about building a community of developers  
around the project.

I totally understand the desire to want to make $ off your work, you  
deserve it.

Good luck in figuring this out.

TTFN,

-bd-


On Sep 22, 2008, at 5:35 AM, Alastair Houghton wrote:

> On 16 Sep 2008, at 09:13, Andrew Bush wrote:
>
>> heh.  you are quite right of course.  I actually prefer the idea I  
>> mentioned in the first instance of gpl'ing it but making it clear  
>> that small commercial places could almost certainly get a  
>> commercial license by asking for one.
>
> I'm extremely anti the GPL right now (particularly version 3, but  
> also any copy of version 2 or earlier that says you can use a later  
> version on a derivative).  The FSF in recent years has been behaving  
> in a much more extreme and in some cases outright unpleasant manner  
> and so any decision to license the code under the GPL would  
> certainly not attract my support.
>
> FWIW, I have been contemplating donating some code I was working on  
> that solves the boolean path operations problem, entirely in the  
> Bezier path domain (i.e. no converting to lines and back again;  
> curves that were in the original path will be preserved, as would  
> lines that approximate a curve) and taking account of the winding  
> rules of the respective paths, but I certainly would not want that  
> code to be available under the GPL and I'm actually leaning towards  
> some sort of license that is *intentionally* incompatible with GPL  
> if indeed it is to be released at all.  Certainly I would want a non- 
> commercial use clause in there.
>
> Kind regards,
>
> Alastair.
>
> -- 
> http://alastairs-place.net
>
>
>
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