Ryan Leavengood wrote:
Man what a massive waste of time this is. I understand the purpose of the GPL but in practice it sure seems to cause more problems than it solves. You don't have to hate it ideologically to learn to hate it practically.
Exactly my feelings.
Anyhow as an open source operating system I really fail to see how Haiku can fail to comply with the GPL. We aren't even modifying the code, just using it. The people who write GPL code probably want it to be used, as long as they are properly attributed, which I think we certainly do. I don't think those people would want to force other open source projects to use the GPL. They just want to avoid commercial companies from using their software without contributing back. When someone wants to use Haiku commercially they can tackle these issues more deeply.
I think that some people just want their license to be used. The other reasons that resulted in the license being created in the first place long lost in their minds. Oh well.
Also I doubt we are on new ground here. Bruno, doesn't Google use some GPL code in their projects? Surely you guys have this figured out?
Glad you asked. I have a meeting scheduled for next Monday with Chris DiBona and Daniel Berlin (yes, from the Be days). They both handle everything opensource related at Google and they want to understand fully what we are doing before giving us an opinion about this. But Chris did tell me that, specially concerning codecs, there is not simple about the licenses involved.
OTOH, he also pointed out that Android has several codecs that are licensed under the Apache 2.0 license and we would have no problems using them if we wanted too.
Of course I'm sure someone here will come along and smack me and say "law this", "sue that", "we need a lawyer this", "the GPL rocks that", but can we look at this from a practical perspective?
I am trying to. :) -Bruno
