Draft 1 of the OpenDesk.com Public Source License

[David Starner]

On Wed, Nov 17, 1999 at 11:47:14PM -0800, Arandir wrote:
> On Wed, 17 Nov 1999, David Starner wrote:
> > Not just as easily. RMS could, at any time, merge in any changes from XEmacs
> > to GNU Emacs. He just choses not to. (He has his reasons, but it is his 
> > choice.) With a copyleft, you can always merge in their changes if you chose
> > to.
> 
> But what makes this situation different from non-copyleft Free Software? In the
> cases of BSD, MIT and Artistic, the changes can be merged into the forks no
> problem. Cross-pollination is not limited to GNU licensed programs.
Go ahead. Merge in the changes for Solaris's version of X. Hope you've got
a good decompiler, because there's no source available. You also might also
want to take a look at Sun's license - I believe it reads "All rights 
reserved."

> Whether a project forks or not seems to be determined by factors very distant
> from the specific licenses.

OTOH, the prototypical massively forked project is BSD, with dozens of 
forked proprietary Unix's based off it.

-- 
David Starner - dstarner98 at aasaa.ofe.org
I see no trend at all, except toward women playing mean and ugly 
sociopaths who are good at killing and who enjoy dark powers. Maybe 
it's just my friends?
	-- Dr. Kromm, on who plays what type of character in RPGs