[ruby-talk:9202] Re: Licensing issues

On Fri, 12 Jan 2001, Dave Thomas wrote:

> OK, you've shamed me out of hiding.
> 
This bothers me. Sincerly. I've realized that this is my "crash
course on open-source/software licensing issues" played out in public and
I'm sorry that it is taking up space when we should be focusing on good
code. This will be my last post until I've seriously thought this true.

My idea with the first post was really to find one good strategy on how to
think about and handle these issues and then leave them behind. I hope it
will happen some day soon... ;-)

> 1. Exactly who collects the 80% that goes back to the Ruby
>    community? Who decides how it is spent? This strikes me as being a
>    large problem where there is no organization that "is"
>    Ruby. Someone (Ben?) suggested a Ruby Institute or somesuch, but
>    that seems to me to suffer from the same problems.
> 
> 2. $30 is way too low. For most companies, this is well below the
>    radar: in fact it probably costs them more than this to get th
>    check written.
> 
> 3. You'll need to have an invoicing system in place to deal with
>    purchase orders.  Unless you have a fairly sophisticated payment
>    receiving system in place, it'll probably cost you a significant
>    portion of the $30 in fees to get the money banked.
> 
This and previous posts has made me realize it's probably not a good
idea; its to awkward shipping small amounts of money around etc.

I've also realized, mainly from reading "L. Peter Deutsch in conversation
with Stig Hackv舅" at http://devlinux.org/deutsch-interview.html, that
what really bothers me (I think, I probably shouldn't be saying
this yet... ;-)) with GPL-like licenses is that someone else
can pack things I develop or contribute to and make money from it without
them having to contribute. Furthermore I'm not thrilled by the fact that
open-source stuff can be used to craft mass-destruction weapons etc.

I'll take a look at the Aladdin Free Public License which looks
interesting.

> So, my recommendation would be to decide whether or not you have a
> commercially viable product. If so, charge for it accordingly. Then
>
I just want to point out that its more of a theoretical discussion than a
practical one for me; I want to KNOW what I'm really doing when applying
a GPL-like license and haven't thought about these things before.

> I'm not trying to put you off posting your work. On the contrary, the
>
I will sure post stuff and probably with open-source licenses. I just want
to understand what I'm doing. This law stuff is both difficult and
boring...

> more stuff out there the better. I'm just suggesting that there may be 
> more to is than asking for a small amount of money for each license.
> 
So I realized. I'm just your average researcher/programmer hoping to live
in a free, creative Ruby world... ;-) Confronting the "real world out
there" can be troublesome. :-)

BTW, my summary of the discussion so far is on 
http://www.ce.chalmers.se/~feldt/ruby/summaries/licensing_ruby_extensions_and_tools.html

I hope my next post will be a RAA-ANN!

Regards,

Robert