Greg M. Johnson <p t e r a n d o n @ the### [at] startswithycom> wrote:
> http://software.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=06/01/17/201221&from=rss

"Although the license allows distribution, some developers and project
administrators are fearful to ship the application because they claim
the license is confusing -- and that it's not the GPL."

  "It's not GPL" seems to be a sadly common attitude. Too many people
seem to think that GPL is the only existing open source license.

  I have had personal experiences on how oppressive the GPL license is.

  We worked for quite many years on a project which was more or less
sponsored by Nokia. At one point they decided that the whole project
was to be distributed under the NOKOS license, which is an OSI approved
one. That was just ok.

  However, we had to be very careful all the time to not to accidentally
use any GPL code in our project because that would have infringed the
GPL license. It doesn't matter if you are making software under an
OSI approved license, you can't use GPL code if you are not making a
GPL software. With every 3rd-party library we used we had to make very
sure it was under the LGPL or another similar license. GPL was no good,
and the culprit was the GPL license itself.

  Well, in the last few years that the project lasted, Nokia pulled out
of it completely, which meant that all the new code we wrote for the
project could be licensed as we liked.
  Licensing the new code under the GPL briefly came into discussion,
but we had to quickly discard the possibility, again because of the
GPL license itself: We can't put part of the code under the GPL if
other parts (in this case the majority) of the code are under another
license (regarldess of it being an OSI approved one).
  Naturally we couldn't re-license the other parts of the code because
they were already licensed under NOKOS.

  It is often said that the GPL is like a virus. However, in our case
it was the complete opposite: Even though we wanted to use it, we
couldn't, so the GPL license itself forbade the "contraction".

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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