launchd for Linux

[Eric Dunbar]

On 5/6/05, Matthew Garrett <mjg59 at srcf.ucam.org> wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-05-05 at 23:30 +0200, Emil Oppeln-Bronikowski wrote:
> >  http://jw.dyndns.org/initng/ -- this pice of software looks very nice.
> > Maybe it could be an Breezy+1 goal? :-) After all we target faster
> > startup times.
> 
> launchd itself has license issues - stuff under the APSL has already
> been removed from Ubuntu.

[This is not written as flame bait]
IIRC the APSL has been deemed open source and nothing evil by more
than enough commentators.

I find the blind adherence to GPL and nothing but quite sad. There is
a lot of good code out there that's being ignored because of closed
minds.

What's wrong with the APSL (I haven't read it... I'm guessing here)?
Oh, heavens to Betsy, it perhaps allows Apple to take the code and
build on it? Or allows a company to make a proprietary version of it.
This is the ultimate in freedom. 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. There's nothing free in being
forced to do something! Can you tell that I'm not with Ubuntu or Linux
because I care about the GPL as a hardcore fundamentalist (I think
it's a less-than-ideal licence... a modified version is certainly
needed)!

MS would have a slightly successful PR campaign on its hands if it
went after the GPL with a little more rational argument than saying
it's "viral" (which, it is). But, I guess that's the problem with
media sound bites, 'viral' is catchy, 'GPL places restrictions on code
modification, and forces any changes to be made public' isn't.

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 is wrong!
A lot of people agreed that pico was worth its weight in gold and were
GPL nuts so thus we have nano (and, fortunately many distros provide
symlinks to nano as pico :-).

With time the issue of non-GPL vs. GPL will die because (a) some tools
will be re-written under the GPL, but, more importatnly (b) non-GPL
code will be that much better than GPL code and people will be forced
to adopt the better tool, regardless of the licence.

Eric.