[Pipet Devel] GPL/LGPL issues

[Brad Chapman]

Hey guys;
	I have been following with interest the whole licensing
discussion, although I really don't know much about it (since thinking
about lawyer type things make my head hurt).

Based on what Richard Stallman wrote (thanks for writing to him,
Jean-Marc -- it really helped clarify things, at least for me). Here are
my comments on the whole thing right now:

1. Programs communicating by CORBA are separate programs, and so the
license won't matter. It doesn't seem like this will change soon. So
people can write replacements for any of the Piper parts if they want. Oh
well, that was a design choice, right? I still think it is a good one to
allow people to rewrite sections in a language independent manner. So we
shouldn't worry about this.

2. Then I guess all we have to worry about is free versus non-free
plugins. If we want people to be able to write non-free plugins that link
with Piper, we should go for the LGPL, if not the GPL is our choice.

3. I think we should have one license for every part (as long as everyone
can agree). This will make things a whole lot clearer about this issue.

So, based on all of this, I give my vote to an LGPL license. If someone
at some company wants to use Piper, and then wants to write a proprietary
plugin to deal with proprietary data, I don't see a big problem with
that. Having people in companies be able to use Piper and extend it is a
big plus to us, since then we will have more testers and users. Many of
these people may work in corporate settings and write in-house only code,
but may also contribute back to Piper. I don't want to lose these users.

So anyways, those are my thoughts about licensing. What do other people
think right now?

Brad