On Wed, 2011-10-26 at 17:04 -0200, Ricardo Fabbri wrote:
- if you want someone to change their licensing, at least be willing
to offer them some cash. basically, you buy the new licensing. this part is not free! I would go as far as saying it's unpolite to ask to switch a license without offering money.
What makes you think that it's more polite to offer money than offering cooking spaghetti with pesto sauce for all his/her friends or helping code something in another project? IMHO, one major advantage of being involved in open source software development is the freedom to contribute what I want, when I want, how much I want etc. and as long as there is no money involved it is easy to keep that freedom untouched. In a similar manner an author is free to change the licensing of their software whenever they want to whatever they want. Probably, this decision for a certain license was done carefully or rather in a light-headed manner. Either way, I'm not clear whether offering money is the (morally) right incentive to re-think that decision. One could even argue that it is corrupting the initial ideal of the original decision. When you say "basically, you buy the new licensing" this sounds to me very much like business lingo about commercial software and also like you were applying economic concepts of commercial software to open source software. To me it's not obvious that in order to get a different license you have to pay money for it.
Roman