I feel compelled to share another perspective on the importance of licenses:<div><br><div>- at every round of funding, we had to sign documents describing our license content. It was very clear that the money people "knew" that anything with the letters "GPL" was a red-flag. They had no understanding whatsoever of the fine points between GPL and LGPL. It might not stop a funding round, but it definitely slows it down.</div>
<div>- when the company that bought my company was being acquired by IBM, they ran code scans on ALL of our source code during due-diligence. Depending on the specific situation, plans were established to remove or replace code, or even kill a product. I can easily imagine situations where the license analysis would kill a deal. (I spent a couple of miserable months documenting licenses, pedigree, etc. for my small part of the portfolio)</div>
<div><br></div><div>When the financial future of your colleagues depends on these types of decisions, they take on a different level of importance.</div><div><br></div><div>-david</div><div><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Nov 21, 2008 at 10:05 AM, Paolo Bonzini <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:bonzini@gnu.org">bonzini@gnu.org</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex;"><div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> There is no incompatibility between MIT and GPL (although there is<br>
> between Apache and GPL, and parts of Squeak are still under ASL 2.0).<br>
<br>
</div>There is no incompatibility between Apache and GPL3, but that's secondary.<br>
<div class="Ih2E3d"><br>
> But GPL is viral (and LGPL too if you rip out code and not just link to<br>
> it) so it infects other code used together with the GPLed code. We do<br>
> not want Squeak to become GPL licensed so we need to be careful what<br>
> code to let in.<br>
<br>
</div>And to be clear about this once for all, I completely agree with the<br>
above assessment. Squeak people do need to be careful, even a bit<br>
paranoid if you want. But implying that you cannot look at GNU<br>
Smalltalk for fear that you'll glance at its code and be tainted by it,<br>
goes way beyond paranoia.<br>
<font color="#888888"><br>
Paolo<br>
<br>
</font></blockquote></div><br></div></div>