On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 19:33:25 +0900 i go bananas hard.off@gmail.com wrote:
hi andy - of course i'd be very willing to know your point of view here, particularly from your firsthand experience.
I got an email like that, it kept me awake for some nights. I experienced annoyance, anger, conflict, frustration. Finally made a utilitarian choice, a greater good served by me giving up on a couple of strong principles, on that occasion. (Maybe the person involved is reading, please know that it's still okay, I did not change my mind, thanks for making me think hard about a whole lot of important things.)
The thing about a "nice email", no matter how politely and tactfully you pen it, is that such a request can feel quite uncomfortable. First it makes the assumption that the programmers choice of licence was somehow shallow, maybe even arbitrary. Let's give all programmers the benefit of the doubt and assume their intelligence extends to proper reflection. The alternative is that they inherited a licence which they have no power or choice to amend.
Secondly, when someone from your own community appeals to you to help them with a "cool project", maybe even to help them make a buck or two, I expect you are like me and rarely hesitate if its no great cost or time commitment. And if your needs and values clearly conflict, then its easy to say no and properly communicate why. But now familiar tensions between business and morality have come to the fore in the last few years, and make demands of bad faith on you. You're basically saying, I want to do this, but I am being bullied by corporation X to do it this way, and since you are the weaker of two conflicting moral opponents I choose to question your values and ask you if you will move in order to suit me (and by proxy the corporation).
To put it in plain talk, its like getting a message from an old friend who got himself mixed up with with some bad drug dealers and needs you to bail him out or something nasty is going to happen. It's a dilemma where helping or not helping feels equally wrong. Where was that friend last week, before he needed the money so bad? Giving them money will just get them more enmeshed with a bad scene.
I don't mean that to reflect on you personally, it's just something that needs to be put out there in the context "change the licence" being an option. It should be a last resort after many other options have been considered. Perfectly good choices consistent with proper moral and free market principles are; if you are a businessmen or lawyer for whom it might be an option why not start your own app store. Or if you're a coder able to pull off writing a non GPL version of the object from scratch, do that. For the rest of the artists, choosing another platform for your application would be the logical, rational choice. So would not using [expr], which is easily replaced by discrete objects and a little thought.