I’ve only made some very minor contributions to the Mac stuff and
some
Altivec blitters, but I think this is good. Personally I prefer
MIT/BSD style licenses anyway, so I’m all for anything that makes
choosing SDL easier for any developer regardless of their intent.
Not to throw this too far off topic, but have you ever had the
experience of contributing code to a project, having a company take
that
project and enhance it slightly, then try to charge you for the
enhanced
version of your own code? I have:
http://www.transgaming.com/
I was also an XFree86 “developer”… No need to harp on that fiasco.
You need to really be careful with BSD-style licensing, especially now
that free software is so much closer to the cutting edge and multiple
architectures are becoming more common.
I haven’t yet made any major contributions to SDL, but I’d hate to see
it slip any lower than LGPL. I understand the problem with embedded
applications, and, IMHO, certainly something should be arranged for
these cases, as long as it remains in the same spirit. Perhaps the
FSF
would like to tackle this issue and come up with a reasonable solution
to this problem for all LGPL projects? Perhaps they have already
looked
into this issue before and already have a solution?
I know this is rather empty since I haven’t really contributed yet,
but
if SDL were to open itself up to this type of closed-development
hijacking, I certainly would not contribute to it in the future. I’ve
learned my lesson.
I contribute to open source to save other developers time and to make
it easier to write better software. I don’t care if someone wants to
sell it back to me. I’d buy it if it was a product that I needed,
and a little competition never hurt anyone. If all they did was make
some slight enhancements, it shouldn’t be a big deal to enhance the
open source version and put them out of business with a free product.
I don’t normally contribute to LGPL or GPL projects specifically
because I don’t want developers to be hassled about how and where
they use the code, I just want them to use it. If they want to make
it better and contribute to the project, that’s great, but I don’t
expect them to. Coercing people into contributing via LGPL/GPL
certainly isn’t necessary, because there’s plenty of counter-examples
where less restrictively licensed projects are doing just fine with
plenty of contributors.
Clearly we simply have different ideals, so there isn’t much more to
discuss here between us.
-bobOn Oct 25, 2005, at 12:26 PM, Steaphan Greene wrote:
On Mon, Oct 24, 2005 at 09:15:48PM -0700, Bob Ippolito wrote: