Re: [Caml-list] User library license

[Sven Luther <luther@dpt-info.u-strasbg.fr>]

On Mon, Feb 24, 2003 at 10:18:36PM +0100, Damien Doligez wrote:
> On Monday, February 24, 2003, at 10:24 AM, Sven Luther wrote:
> 
> >The problem with that is that anyone can take your work, modify it, and
> >don't give anything back, look at apple for example, they took the BSD
> >kernel, and don't give anything back.
> 
> Doh.  Apple has release all their changes to the BSD kernel
> under an open source licence.  If the kernel had been under GPL,
> that wouldn't have changed much for them.

Sure, but they don't release low level information on their hardware, in
particular not some stuff needed by the XFree86 developpers, altough
they are happy enough to integrate the XDarwin server in MacOS X.

Anyway, maybe it was not the best idea to take Apple as example, give me
another try. There is log of BSD code in windows NT, and Microsoft sure
didn't give anything back for it, they even tried to hijack the open
standards and such.

> > I think licencing is the main
> >reason they choose a BSD kernel over a linux one back then.
> 
> It was NeXT that chose a BSD kernel.  Darwin is the son of NeXTStep.
> Back then, Linux didn't exist, so the choice was not hard to make.

But they could have changed that in early 98 when Steve came back to
apple. I am sure one strong argument against it was the licencing.

> > I suppose some people (including me) would not be willing to
> >contribute code under these circunstances
> 
> The problem with these license discussions is that nobody knows
> what they are talking about.  We're not lawyers after all.

Speak for yourself, as a debian developper, i have to pay close
attention to licencing issues, and think i know at least something about
it. I am not sure a lawyer not specialized in computer licences would
know more about it than me.

But anyway, this is more a political decision than a legal one, and
again, please let's take this discution to some other place, i will no
more post on this subject here.

Friendly,

Sven Luther
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