[squeak-dev] LGPL considered crippling license :)

Igor Stasenko siguctua at gmail.com
Sat Sep 26 06:43:51 UTC 2009


I haven't visited the Orge site long ago, i found an interesting news,
that they switching license to MIT!

The motivation & conclusions why they decided to switch are very interesting:

--- citation ---
Won’t this mean people can ‘rip off’ OGRE in proprietary software?

The LGPL already allowed OGRE to be used in proprietary software, and
this is something we’ve always encouraged. The main difference between
the LGPL and the MIT License is that there is no requirement to
release modified source code; only to include our copyright and the
MIT license text in the final product.

While not requiring modified source to be released might initially
seem like giving up an important motivator to contribute code back to
the community, we’ve noticed something in recent years: 99% of useful
code contributions come from people who are motivated to participate
in the project regardless of what the license tells them they have to
do. It’s our experience that a certain percentage of the user
community will always participate and contribute back, and therefore
encouraging adoption via simpler licensing is likely to result in more
contributions overall than coersion via complex and restrictive
licensing does. In addition, people who are internally motivated to
participate tend to provide much higher quality and more usable
contributions than those who only do it because they are forced to.
--- citation ---

you can read the full article here:

http://www.ogre3d.org/2009/09/15/ogre-will-switch-to-the-mit-license-from-1-7#more-685

P.S. i found it a very good sign, that more and more open-source
communities gradually moving towards more permissive license, as MIT
is.

-- 
Best regards,
Igor Stasenko AKA sig.



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