From: Christian Boos <cboos@...>
Date: 2001-12-20T22:56:54+09:00
Subject: [ruby-talk:29114] Re: Ruby 'make' replacement (Re: stderr from external process?)

Hello Marko,

-----Original Message-----
From: Marko Schulz [mailto:in6x059@public.uni-hamburg.de]
Sent: Thursday, December 20, 2001 2:34 PM
To: ruby-talk ML
Subject: [ruby-talk:29112] Re: Ruby 'make' replacement (Re: stderr from
external process?)


On Thu, Dec 20, 2001 at 10:05:21PM +0900, Christian Boos wrote:
> On licensing issues...
  :
> I'll choose the Ruby license, as this choice won't prevent me to bundle
this
> piece of software with the rest of our closed source software (that
doesn't
> make sense, given what we are selling, but I want to have the option,
> just in case).

As long as you are the only author of a software, you are always able
to distribute it under any license you want. Even if you distributed
it under the GPL, you may include it in your own proprietary software
or sell/give the software to someone else under a license which allows
them to include the source in software which is not free software.

--------------------

That's pretty theoretical. Once you give something to the community as GPL,
you may as well give up the copyright to the FSF :)
1) if the software is interesting and is free software, you won't be
   for too long the "only author"
2) enhancements made by other people have to be GPLed
3) you won't be able to integrate those enhancement in your non-GPLed
   version of the software
4) you're stuck ... or you have enough manpower to do a "clean room"
   re-implementation of those extensions

Point 4) is not an option for me. That was the main reason why Trolltech
waited so long to adopt the GPL for Qt: Once they felt they were "strong"
enough to prevent forks by being able to reimplement whatever would show up
in GPLed code, they did it.

-- Christian

PS: I don't want to start a license thread (I've already been part of
some in the past, so beware :)