[GRASS5] Leaving

[Thierry Laronde]

On Tue, Nov 25, 2003 at 03:44:50PM +0200, Buchan Milne wrote:
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> > 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.
> 
> But if you go with a license which doens't require changes to be
> contributed back, a developer has no incentive to provide those changes
> back to the community. If the license does require it, the incentive is
> the ability to use the software in the first place.

The incentive for giving code is to be rewarded by recognition
(that's why a BSD licence _without_ the advertisement is a non sense),
and by the strong feeling that he belongs to a community (a developer
community) from which he benefits (he's not the only one to work; the
principle "Hey, give me your watch and in exchange, to be fair, I will
tell you what time it is" has never attracted anybody). 

> 
> AFAIK, BSD with the advertisement clause is not GPL compatible, 

If I'm not mistaken, the BSD licence, with or without the clause, as the
MIT licence have always been considered free by the FSF.

And please note that whether this will be the case or not, it's not a
problem: I'm so free, that I even do not consider that the FSF or Debian
(I'm the organizer of the 2 first Debian conferences BTW :-^) have the
absolute truth in this domain.

> >
> > 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.
> 
> Well, grass currently runs on platforms which would possibly not be
> supportable if you use Motif (Cygwin and Mac OS X).
> 
> Using Motif basically makes grass less attractive on all the most
> popular platforms ...

So I keep on saying: GRASS is a world by itself, it's not a five minutes
application, so it can run as an application, hiding the kernel (a user
has _no_ obligation to see something else than what he wants to use),
i.e. dualboot or remote boot is a serious option.

Deal with the machine: yes. Deal with whatever OS: no.

But that's only my options. "There are several houses in the house of
the Father".

Cheers,
-- 
Thierry Laronde (Alceste) <tlaronde at polynum.org>
Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89  250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C