From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2005-08-14T02:55:40+09:00 Subject: Re: Ruby report generation tool On 8/13/05, Greg Brown wrote: > Austin Ziegler wrote: >> Neither the Ruby licence nor the Clarified Artistic licences are >> "approved" by the OSI (www.opensource.org). > That's not true. The 8th clause is the one that makes the Artistic > license GPL compatible, and the approval by OSI is listed below: > > http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license.php If that's the clause that makes the difference between the CAL and the AL, then you're right. However, I was looking at the title. >> That said, the Ruby licence is pretty clear as to what's allowed >> (pretty much "anything"). I still think that your best choice is >> going to be BSDish or MITish, but if you go with anything else, then >> you'll probably need to do CAL/GPL disjunctive or the Ruby licensing >> option. > I am honestly not interested in using a BSD or MIT style license. I > understand there is a strong tradition in the Ruby community to lean > this way, and I respect this, but I am in favor of the FSF's ideals > and am looking to preserve them as much as possible while still > offering a fair and pragmatic licensing scheme for my software. Ah. That's where we differ. I disapprove of RMS and the FSF's methods (not so much the ideals) so strongly that, given a choice, I will not licence anything GPLed and if there's a choice between a GPLed library and a non-GPLed library, I will preferentially use the non-GPLed library even at the possible expense of features. I have no issue with the GNU GPL *as a licence philosophy*, but I have major problems with the politicised preamble that I do not wish to redistribute. Ever. I also have major issues with the denial of the GNU GPL as a viral licence (that's a feature of the licence, not a negative point), the whole "software freedom" issue (as if software were something that could be emancipated), and in general the deception that goes on surrounding the GNU GPL. IMO, there's similar licences (the Mozilla PL, for one) that are friendlier, stronger, and have no political crap surrounding them. IIRC, there's a licence that is a variant of the GNU GPL simply with the preamble removed. Note that disjunctive licensing is questionable at best, at leaves your users open to choose whichever licence they want. Strictly speaking, although I've preserved the intent of several packages (e.g., Text::Format, others) by keeping the GPL as one of the specified licences, but I could have *simply* chosen to change the licence for the Ruby version as the Artistic licence, completely ignoring the GNU GPL's existence on the Perl version of Text::Format. Not trying to be difficult here or even start a flamewar, but trying to explain why I prefer the other licences to the GNU GPL. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca