From: Austin Ziegler Date: 2006-02-02T04:48:25+09:00 Subject: Re: ANN: WSS4R was released On 01/02/06, Gregory Brown wrote: > On 2/1/06, Austin Ziegler wrote: >> On 01/02/06, ara.t.howard@noaa.gov wrote: >>> On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote: >>>> I may be in the minority, but I believe that the GNU GPL is a very >>>> bad licence for libraries in a highly dynamic environment such as >>>> Ruby, at least if it is the only licence. (This is one reason I've >>>> never looked further at a number of libraries and have in at least >>>> one instance created a clean implementation of a ported library.) >>> i hate thinking about this stuff and have just released under ruby's >>> licence to avoid issues - see any problem with that? >> Not at all. My problem here is that WSS4R is under GNU GPL only, not >> dually licensed. It is the GNU GPL that is a problem, not the Ruby >> licence. > That's really highly subjective. Outside of Ruby, I *always* use the > GPL. Hmmm. Not really subjective. The GNU GPL is explicitly a highly restrictive licence. The GPLv3 is going to be even more restrictive, although it looks like it might play better with open source licences. > The license of Ruby only holds ground because the GPL is there. The > terms and conditions that Matz wrote are highly permissive, but do > very little to protect an authors rights. Can you please elaborate on what you mean here? I personally suspect confusion in what is meant, but the Ruby license is in fact little different than the MIT-style licence or the modified BSD licence, which both provide better protection than the GNU GPL for authors' "moral rights" (which most emphatically do not exist in the US or Canada) of insisting to be recognised as the author of a particular work. The GPLv3 will, again, handle this better. > Still, in interest of avoiding a flame war, myself being a strong > supporter of the Free Software Foundation and copyleft in general, [...] And this is where you and I differ. I do *not* support "copyleft." I *do* support open source. I hold no opinion on the FSF proper, but have great dislike for RMS and his stances. I do maintain and will always maintain that my applications and libraries released under an MIT-style licence will always be freer than anything released under the GNU GPL, any version. As you said, though, the Ruby disjunctive licence is (almost) the best choice for Ruby applications and libraries. I still use the MIT licence where I can. -austin -- Austin Ziegler * halostatue@gmail.com * Alternate: austin@halostatue.ca