An explanation of the difficulty of solving license proliferation in one sentence
Russell Nelson
nelson at crynwr.com
Wed Mar 9 20:07:29 UTC 2005
Forrest J. Cavalier III writes:
> Licenses exist to serve the needs of the SOFTWARE AUTHORS.
And one of those needs is for people to use their software. If a
software author didn't have that need, they wouldn't bother publishing
their software.
I feel just as strongly as you that it's not possible to force anybody
to relicense. It will require persuasion.
> If a project wants to use a license that is not well accepted and
> not compatible with other licenses, then yes, they should be gently
> reminded of that at license submission, but they must remain free to
> do that and take the consequences of incompatibility.
That's what we already do.
> It still irks me that the people who formed the OSI really bungled
> (and still bungle) the branding strategy that was going to be important
> to increase FLOSS acceptance commercially. Tis a pity. How many
> years did it take to get a logo? Who's enforcing its application now?
There's nothing so unattractive as whining about the effort put out by
volunteers by somebody who hasn't lifted a hand to help.
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