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Kawa (re-)licensing
- From: Per Bothner <per at bothner dot com>
- To: kawa at sourceware dot org
- Date: Mon, 07 Nov 2005 23:00:01 -0800
- Subject: Kawa (re-)licensing
Various people have asked about the current license of Kawa.
Advantages of the current license include:
- Clearly Free, open-source, GPL-compatible.
- Compatible with proprietary code.
- Encourages people to submit patches back to the main codebase.
- Provides a motivation for companies to negotiate a commercial
license, which provides funding for Kawa.
Disadvantages include:
- The license is unusual/complex.
- Some projects may be reluctant to use Kawa code, especially
if they use a license less restrictive than the GPL or
incompatible with it, such as Apache.
- Some contributors may be reluctant to contribute - i.e. why
should they give me their work?
I'm not sure what the best thing for Kawa is. Comments?
I'm thinking as an experient to try a hybrid:
- For Kawa "releases" use a simple MIT/BSD/X11-style license:
http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
This would apply to (say) kawa-1.8.tar.gz (.jar) as downloadable
from ftp.gnu.org.
- Keep the current license for "unreleased" code - i.e. the CVS sources,
snapshots, and alpha/beta versions.
This doesn't help with the complexity issue (arguably it makes it
worse), but may reduce the other disadvantages of the current
license, while maintaining the advantages.
Opinions?
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/