oh... the irony

[Greg Stein <gs...@lyra.org>]

Funny that Apache is one of the most successful open-source efforts to
date, yet it is still subject to the whims of corporate intellectual
property concerns...

Sigh. Had to be said.

-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Re: oh... the irony

[Greg Stein <gs...@lyra.org>]

Dean Gaudet wrote:
> 
> On Tue, 25 May 1999, Greg Stein wrote:
> 
> > Funny that Apache is one of the most successful open-source efforts to
> > date, yet it is still subject to the whims of corporate intellectual
> > property concerns...
> >
> > Sigh. Had to be said.
> 
> Dude, it's not just corporations who have IP concerns -- universities also
> have IP concerns.  The MPL 1.0 is just wrong in the patent clause, and any
> university lawyer awake enough would prevent all their employees from
> contributing code to an MPLed program... because doing so compromises the
> university's IP.
> 
> A lot of open source folks come from universities.
> 
> I know your frustration -- apache-nspr never went anywhere because NSPR
> was under the NPL.  It's not "all bad", we learned stuff (some day someone
> needs to mine out the bugfixes and stuff I did in nspr which will
> otherwise be lost ;)

Yah, I hear you and agree... I'm definitely aware of the need and even
agree with the necessity to avoid "bad" licenses. I just find it quite
ironic that the open-source development methodology is effectively a
response against intellectual property (closed, proprietary source), yet
we still fall prey to IP issues.

NSPR is an excellent case in point; Expat is less so.

Frankly, I have no problem with removing Expat for now; I just wish that
it didn't have to be so. But hey... these licenses are put in place to
*protect* us against IP issues, so they should be respected :-)

Cheers,
-g

--
Greg Stein, http://www.lyra.org/

Re: oh... the irony

[Dean Gaudet <dg...@arctic.org>]

On Tue, 25 May 1999, Greg Stein wrote:

> Funny that Apache is one of the most successful open-source efforts to
> date, yet it is still subject to the whims of corporate intellectual
> property concerns...
> 
> Sigh. Had to be said.

Dude, it's not just corporations who have IP concerns -- universities also
have IP concerns.  The MPL 1.0 is just wrong in the patent clause, and any
university lawyer awake enough would prevent all their employees from
contributing code to an MPLed program... because doing so compromises the
university's IP. 

A lot of open source folks come from universities. 

I know your frustration -- apache-nspr never went anywhere because NSPR
was under the NPL.  It's not "all bad", we learned stuff (some day someone
needs to mine out the bugfixes and stuff I did in nspr which will
otherwise be lost ;)

One of these days I hope to understand this need for all open source
projects to include all other open source projects in their source tree ;) 

Dean