Licensing of Lisaac

[Xavier Oswald]

On 16:35 Wed 26 Aug     , Nicolas Boulay wrote:
> 2009/8/26 Xavier Oswald <xoswald at gmail.com>:
> > On 15:58 Wed 26 Aug     , Nicolas Boulay wrote:
> >> To be more simple, i resume the goal, i think that the Lisaac project
> >> should follow:
> >>
> >> - stay open source
> >> - enable the creation of large lib collection using the same licence
> >> - a new langage can't avoid the business market
> >> - We should avoid to fragment as Unix or Spice.
> >> - We should not force the licence of each project to use other FOSS licence
> >
> > Goot point.
> >
> > Im raising something else..
> > What do you think about dual-licence, one for free purpose and another one for
> > commercial application ?
> >
> 
> Why not. But what is your goal ? What do you want to achieve.

Well, some big project are using dual-lincensing to support the free sotware
business model. One is a proprietary software licence, which allow creating
proprietary software while the other one is an open source license. Im think of
mysql, qt, asterix etc..

But they are selling software, and we are not a company. So maybe Im wrong with
this proposition of dual-licencing.


The point is that we have to avoid using GPLv3 since it doesn't permit any
commerial appplication using our library. 
What do you think about the MPL licence ? It seems to be between the GPL and
BSD.

So what is possible:
 - LGPL + extension
 - BSD/MIT
 - MPL ?
 - ... ?

The fact is that if the compiler is in GPL, no commercial app derived from the
compiler can be made, so a company will not be able to change the compiler for
their needs. That's a good point. So, the idea behind this, is that we could use
the BSD licence since the library is done according the compiler specification.
If a company want to change the library, they will not be able to do this in a
large scale since the compiler will then not work and we can reject companie's
proposal. The library contain primitives used by the compiler that cannot be
changed. The typing is done and checked by the compiler so choosing another
typing is not possible. Since the compiler is based on this library, you will
not be able to bootstrap with another library.

Well I thus think it's not annoying having the library under a BSD licence. and
thus we could allow lot of derivated work. AFAIK, a company will not change our
library at all, they could do fixes, add functionnalities and do then what they
want with the code they have written in Lisaac. But they will always be linked
with us since we are only few guys beeing able to fix important bugs and they
will have to follow our way since we can do changes which will break their work.

Greetings,
-- 
  ,''`.  ** Xavier Oswald <xoswald at debian.org>                            
 : :' :  ** Research Engineer                                           
 `. `'   ** GNU/LINUX Debian Developer (http://debian.org)              
   `-    ** Isaac Project Developer (http://isaacproject.u-strasbg.fr/)