Re: [Gforge-devel] Architecture, LGPL

[Tim Perdue]

Ryan T. Sammartino wrote:
> However, and even RMS himself has said this, there some applications
> where it makes sense to allow proprietary hooks.  That's why there is an
> LGPL in the first place.  He also blessed Ogg Vorbis moving from LGPL to
> BSD-style so that they could widen their industry influence.  So cleary
> there is some lattitude in RMS' thinking, even if it hasn't filtered
> down to the followers yet.  I think GForge is an ideal candidate for
> LGPL-ing (to coin a verb): there will always be a libre core and a fair
> amount of libre applications (to use the phpgroupware term), but I don't see 
> any reason why people (especially the man behind the vast majority of
> the code) couldn't write proprietary addons for the sake of wider
> acceptance.

I tend to think open source is best, however I have never understood the 
"free speech" obsession. There's no "free" hardware or "free" 
electricity or free internet to run it on, so it seems rather moot to me.

OSI is a different, and pragmatic approach from FSF, where you can make 
software a standard by sharing it, and get others to enhance or patch 
it. But in reality I know that *most* of the code is written by the 
inner core of developers, and everyone else is pretty much getting the 
benefit of their work. If it's rewarding to the core developers in some 
way, it is sustainable, and if not, it's will be deadwood like most of 
the 50,000+ projects on sf.net.

> I'm actually thinking of a total rewrite from scratch for a 4.0 release.
> Seriously.

I don't know if I have another rewrite in me, honestly.

Tim