[License-discuss] FreeAndFair license

[John Cowan]

On Wed, Jun 14, 2017 at 9:12 AM, Brent Turner <turnerbrentm at gmail.com>
wrote:

John.  Can you explain why a group such as Oset or FFE would not want to
> simply use GPL ?


I don't know those organizations.  But if you issue software under the GPL,
you reduce your market share by people who want to modify it and won't or
can't accept the GPL terms, or who just want to use it and are irrationally
afraid of or hostile to the GPL.  Likewise, if you issue software on BSD
terms, you reduce your market share by people who are irrationally hostile
to BSD software, or fear that if a proprietary fork is made it will somehow
affect their BSD rights or cut them off from their only available source of
improvements.  If you do both, you have some hope of retaining these people
who would otherwise be lost.

I know of a program which consists of a fairly large library which does
most of the work, issued under a permissive license, and a small
interactive main program which provides the command line.  This main
program is provided in two versions.  One works with GNU readline and is
GPLed; the other does not provide line editing and is under the same
permissive license as the library.  The author can do this because he is
free to violate his own license to create the readline-free version of the
code, but users would not be.

(Nowadays this wouldn't be necessary, as there are drop-in replacements for
readline, but the principle is still the same.)

-- 
John Cowan          http://vrici.lojban.org/~cowan        cowan at ccil.org
Business before pleasure, if not too bloomering long before.
        --Nicholas van Rijn
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