Archive of UserLand's first discussion group, started October 5, 1998.
Re: Thoughts on ESR and Perl
Author: Eric Kidd Posted: 8/26/1999; 1:36:14 PM Topic: Opening Up Linux Journal and O'Reilly Msg #: 10004 (In response to 9991) Prev/Next: 10002 / 10005
Truth be told, there's a shitload of open source in the Frontier 1.0 release. Now the license agreement zealots (like ESR and Stallman) will ask where's the license agreement? But come on folks, when you ship source, it's out. In any case, we explicitly said people could use the source for whatever purpose they wanted to.License agreements only matter when you're trying to build a community of developers. If you don't need anybody to make major contributions, license agreements don't matter too much.
It's only when you're looking to build a group of dedicated maintainers that you need to write down the ground rules. Linus' ground rules are simple: "Everything that goes into the Linux kernel is public property. You are allowed to write drivers under any license you want, but I won't hesitate to break your binary drivers if they stick their fingers deep into my kernel and I need to change something."
Guido has different ground rules for Python: "You can do anything you want with Python. If you want me to accept your changes into the official distribution, though, you must let anybody do anything they want with your changes."
Netscape has yet another set of groundrules, and they're very complicated. Some developers didn't want to play by these rules; because the rules give Netscape extra rights to contributors' code. One software laywer I know said she'd never publish a license like Netscape's; she felt it gave lawyers a bad name.
The licenses are nothing more or less than a social contract. They let everybody know the rules to the game before the game begins.
Ask anyone, I was never a religious zealot for the Mac. I never told anyone to shut up. The Mac was simply better, then it wasn't anymore, and now it may be again.
I used an iMac the other day for a few hours. It was a very sweet machine. Apple's gotten serious about ease-of-use again, and their new machines feel very snappy and very professional. It was nice to play with ResEdit again, too. What a clever little program.
Cheers,
Eric
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