[GRASS5] Leaving

[Thierry Laronde]

On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 09:36:06PM +0000, Glynn Clements wrote:
> 
> Markus Neteler wrote:
> 
> > 
> > Mhhh, time to fork the project? Maybe some developers would join you...
> > (recalling the license discussion). I agree with you that more radical
> > changes are needed, as already posted several times.
> > Maybe LGPL'ed libraries with GPL'ed application layer? Well, most
> > developers have posted their opinion on this already.
> 
> It's not clear to me exactly what Thierry's complaints with the
> current direction are, but they don't appear to be related to
> GRASS' licensing policy.

I think that Markus is looking forward: it's clear that by starting with
the Public Domain code, the licence of the future work has to be
decided. The licence impacts:
- The availability of the source enhancements
- The attractivity to developers
- The possibility for developers, and primarily the GRASS developers to
make a living with GRASS (that is to have time to work on it because
they get incomes from it);

The third point discards GPL: if once you have made a work, everybody
can take it and do whatever one wants, a developer has no incitative and
no means to be paid for what it actually does. Bu this impacts the
userland level which is typically a domain for custom applications.

If one wants to make a GPL userland stuff, one has to be able to. But if
one wants (or simply needs) to make a userland stuff not GPLed, one has
to have the ability to do so.

For the core, there are two major options: BSD (_with_ advertisement
clause) or LGPL. At first sight LGPL seems better since it imposes to
contribute back the source enhancements. But on a pratical level, 
BSD with the obligation to advertise the fact that you use code you have
not developed (but what developed by such and such) and the
impractibility to maintain a CVS tree too diverging from a code you rely
on, make it possible.

For the moment, I don't know if I will choose BSD or LGPL for the core
(the libraries). But I will not choose GPL for that.

> 
> > > My plan are, too, to resurrect the X Window/Motif interface which is far
> > > more challenging, at least for me: I know at the moment strictly nothing
> > > about Motif programming and there has been a fair amount of changes
> > > since 1991...
> > 
> > If Motif is a good choice, I am not sure. Looks a bit dated.
> 
> I don't think that Motif is a good choice here. And I seem to be one
> of the few open-source programmers who hasn't succumbed to the Gtk/Qt
> groupthink. I still think that Motif is a good choice for an
> X-specific toolkit on technical grounds (in terms of acceptability, it
> depends upon the target platform; Motif is a good choice on commercial
> Unices, a poor one on Linux).
> 
> However, it definitely wouldn't be the right approach from a
> portability perspective. Particularly given the licensing issues;
> Motif is free for open-source platforms, but that doesn't apply to
> MacOSX, and probably not to Cygwin (Cygwin is open-source, Windows
> isn't). [Licensing isn't an issue for commercial Unices, as they
> invariably include Motif with the OS.]
> 

The fact to impose the use of an open source kernel is for me not a
problem, since one can provide a free kernel on almost any kind of
hardware architecture. And the Unix orientation of GRASS (as expressed
in the progman of at least 4.1.5) has to be retained.
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde at polynum.org>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C