launchd for Linux

[Colin Watson]

[moving to sounder@, where this is on-topic; please respect the
Mail-Followup-To]

On Fri, May 06, 2005 at 07:42:04AM -0400, Eric Dunbar wrote:
> I find the blind adherence to GPL and nothing but quite sad.

There's no such blind adherence in Ubuntu. We include software under a
wide variety of licences, not all of which are even GPL-compatible.
Saying "we have a problem with this licence" doesn't imply "we only want
the GPL".

> The GPL is not a free licence since it places restrictions on code --
> you cannot make improvements to it that you aren't forced to publish.

While that's a popular misconception, it is in fact not true. You cannot
make improvements to it *and give binaries to other people* without
being forced to give *those people* the source to your improvements, but
you are perfectly free to make local modifications without telling
anyone about them, or to give source code only to the same people to
whom you give binaries.

> Anyway, that's just my devil's advocate side coming through. I do
> think the GPL is valuable, BUT, blind adherence to it is NOT. It is
> preventing good tools from being widely used. For e.g., pine is
> undoubtedly the most mature and functional e-mailer out there, but
> licence fanatics have removed it from GPL-only distros.

This had nothing to do with the GPL, and the distributions in question
were not GPL-only; if they were, they would include much less software
than they do.

Some modifications to Pine were essential just to get the thing packaged
in a way that fit in with the rest of each distribution. The University
of Washington, who own the copyright on Pine, said that distributions
had to ask permission before distributing modified versions; that
permission wouldn't extend to derivatives of those distributions, and
wouldn't cover people selling commercial versions either. Their licence
also placed complicated restrictions on the way Pine was to be
redistributed, which led to practical problems.

Some people did try to create a version that didn't suffer from these
restrictions: there was one called "Mana", forked from an earlier
version of the software that had been distributed under a licence that
looked like it permitted the sorts of things people wanted to do. I
think there were other attempts as well. Looking back through the
history, it appears that UW threatened the developers of Mana with
lawsuits on at least one occasion.

This was never an issue of licensing fanaticism, it was an issue of
things being legal at all, and an issue of not getting sued. I used to
use Pine myself; it's a nice, easy-to-use, basic mailer, albeit limited
compared to more modern options. At some point, though, it just stops
being worth the hassle for distributors ...

Cheers,

-- 
Colin Watson                                       [cjwatson at ubuntu.com]