On Mon, Oct 24, 2011 at 08:36:39AM +0100, Andy Farnell wrote:
On Mon, 24 Oct 2011 11:16:18 +0900 i go bananas hard.off@gmail.com wrote:
in that case, it might be as simple as a nice email to Shadrokh Yadegari to get his expr for pd license changed to LGPL too??
What makes you think its okay to ask someone to reconsider a carefully made moral decision simply for your convenience?
I don't know the specifics of the expr case, and it may well be that the GPL is something that Shadrokh Yadegari feels strongly about. Still, as a data point, when the codebase that is now Apache Lucy was granted to the ASF and we had to get 20 copyright holders to sign off on on a license change from GPL/Artistic to Apache 2.0, not a single one of them objected. Not everyone cares.
From a practical standpoint, if there have been any patches to expr since it
was added to Pd, it would be necessary to secure the consent of those authors as well, any one of whom may refuse, or might not be available. Relicensing is hard.
But especially if writing a from-scratch alternative to expr is being contemplated, I think it's commendable and wise for mr. bananas to at least explore the possibility of achieving his objective via polite requests before taking any other actions.
I don't think he should feel bad about that at all. Indeed, that is the community-friendly approach, attempting to keep development united. I choose to have faith that if expr's author receives a polite request regarding relicensing, the response will also be polite, even if it is a rebuff. If my faith is misplaced and the response is instead an indignant flame, in my opinion, that does not reflect poorly on mr. bananas.
There are those of us who are on the BSD side of the fence who also have strong moral reasons for our choices. You tend not to hear from us as often because we feel you should have the freedom to GPL works which bundle ours, just as you should have the right to release bundled software under proprietary licenses. Despite these strong beliefs, if I were to receive a sincere request to relicense software I had written under a copyleft license, I would not be offended and I would contemplate it in good faith.
Marvin Humphrey