Re: tlug: KDE, GTK...etc. etc

["Manuel M. T. Chakravarty" <chak@example.com>]

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull@example.com> wrote,

> >>>>> "Manu" == Manuel M T Chakravarty <chak@example.com> writes:
> 
>     >> These are some of the reasons why I use GNOME[1].
> 
>     Manu> Me too :-) All these different licenses only hinder code
>     Manu> reuse...
> 
> Well, of course.  That's what they're for.  Not everybody has the
> luxury of developing on scientific grants-in-aid; note that the FSF
> made a special dispensation for the Mule code, which is still
> copyright ETL even though it is GPL.  The FSF has long pointedly
> refused to consider any such arrangement with Sun.

That is something different (nothing to do with general code
reuse).  The FSF has a policy of requiring authors to
transfer their copyright to them when code is submitted (to
make it easier for them to defend that copyright - at least
that's one of the stated reasons).

In contrast, Linus never wanted the copyright for
contributions that other people made to the kernel.  As a
consequence, eg, gcc is all FSF's, whereas the Linux kernel
belongs to I don't know how many people.  Still both is
GPLed code and if I wanted to produce a OS kernel with an
integrated compiler, I can use code from both projects (as
long as I release my compiling kernel under the GPL).

However, if I want to use Qt or Mozilla code together with
the Linux kernel and produce an OS with integrated GUI and
Web browser (what an absurd idea!), I am stuck -- no way to
combine them.

Some clever people, like Larry Wall and some people at
mozilla.org, who understand this kind of problem, release
their code under dual licenses (in the case of Perl, the
Artistic license and GPL, and in the case of Mozilla's
JavaScript engine, MPL and GPL).

> But people who develop for a living want to do so at a profit.  And it 
> is still an area of active "research" as to what licenses do this
> "best."  Heck, even a definition of what "best" might mean is
> vaporware at this point.

True.  Still IMHO, this lisence inflation is mainly to the
advantage of lawyers.  Its value for protecting profit is
usually quite questionable.  But I agree that it is a
consequence of a deep insecurity on the side of the
corporations. 

I also think that the value of the GPL as a license for
protecting profit is often underestimated (see the chapter
on Cygnus in the book "Open Sources") - it can make the
barrier for entry into a market quite high.

(Netscape/Mozilla, BTW, has a good excuse, they didn't own
all the code that they have to link into the bowser and so
couldn't go GPL.)

>     Manu> BTW, I think, GTK+ is the more interesting toolkit in the
>     Manu> long run anyway.  With Qt, you are basically restricted to
>     Manu> develop in C++ (*yuck*), but for GTK+ there are bindings for
> 
> It's worse than that; you are normally limited to developing in the
> C++ used to build the library.

True.  But at least, in the case of Qt, you have the source
and can recompile it with a different compiler (if you are
lucky enough that the source is accepted by another compiler 
-- which is far from guaranteed in the case of C++, I think).

> The technical content that kept this post off advocacy.

I'd regard an objective (whatever that means) discussion
about the implications of open-source licenses on a Linux &
Free Software mailing list as technical (the potential for
code reuse is technically quite important after all).

Cheers,

Manuel
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