Draft 1 of the OpenDesk.com Public Source License

[Wilfredo Sanchez]

| Fred, can you tell us how many external contributions you are
| getting to Darwin? There is a quid-pro-quo in which we all exchange 
| "developer attention", some of us writing system code or libraries, 
| others applications, etc. I'd be much less willing to release
| free code if it were likely to be integrated into someone's private 
| project without an equal return of code to the public.  I surmise that 
| the proportionally lower interest in BSD, Mozilla, and other non-GPL 
| projects might be due in part to this sentiment.

  Dude, did you hit your head on something?  Most of Darwin is  
external contributions.  We aren't trying to fork off our own BSD so  
much as work with existing groups, and every group we've talked to  
have been quite receptive about supporting Darwin/Mac OS X.  NetBSD,  
Apache, FreeBSD, and MIT have all added me to their developer teams  
specifically because this.

  As for the stuff that originates at Apple:  NetInfo was ported to  
Linux within weeks of its release.  The Streaming Server is running  
on Solaris, FreeBSD, and Linux, and there are people working on  
cleaning up the proxy code. OpenPlay is up and going on Windows, and  
we've made an external developer the tech lead for OpenPlay; he's our  
first outside developer to run one of our projects, and quite likely  
not the last.  Perhaps you aren't paying attention, and that's fine,  
but that doesn't imply nobody else is paying attention, so don't  
blow so much smoke.

  You also conveniently draw your "disproportionally lower intetest"  
line along license boundaries.  There are non-GPL (i.e actually  
free) projects that do just fine. Apache is free, and it's getting  
quite of bit of attention.  Had BSD shaken AT&T earlier the GPL would  
probably not be as widely used as it is today.  GNU/Linux  
popularized the GPL because it was the first free (enough) system out  
the door, not because of the GPL and your sentiment.  Things don't  
always make it to the top because they are the best.  Good enough  
works, too.  We've seen this in the OS marketplace.

  I have people come to my office all the time (usually interns),  
who want to know why we aren't using the GPL, because the GPL is  
great you know.  All their nerd friends say so on Slashdot.  None of  
these people actually read the GPL.  Is this the proportionally  
higher interest you use as a metric to judge the GPL?

  So you're telling Open Desk to dual license their code so you can  
make a GPL version that they won't be able to use any more unless  
they swallow the GPL.  You have a skewed sense of fairness.

	-Fred


--
       Wilfredo Sanchez, wsanchez at apple.com
Apple Computer, Inc., Core Operating Systems / BSD
          Technical Lead, Darwin Project
   1 Infinite Loop, 302-4K, Cupertino, CA 95014