Date: Mon, 3 Aug 1998 19:01:45 +0000 (GMT) From: Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> To: reilly@zeta.org.au (Andrew Reilly) Cc: tlambert@primenet.com, malte.lance@gmx.net, reilly@zeta.org.au, jgrosch@mooseriver.com, shocking@prth.pgs.com, hackers@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Fast FFT routines with source? Message-ID: <199808031901.MAA00238@usr07.primenet.com> In-Reply-To: <19980803104312.21747.qmail@gurney.reilly.home> from "Andrew Reilly" at Aug 3, 98 08:43:11 pm
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> It's not quite that bad, just not useful for BSD-style free software. > The last time I read the doco they explained that they'd used this > licence so that GPL's code could be written. Their intention was (is) > to also offer a non-GPL'd version to those willing to pay a commercial > licence fee. In general, manufacturing processes are trade secrets. For a trade secret, you can't use a source available license and expect to keep the secret. That's one of the intents of a source available license: to allow those who disagree with it to effectively rewrite Article I, section 12 of the US Constitution. Note that fixes contributed back under the terms of that license are also covered under the terms of that license; that is, as derivative works, they contaminate the authorship of the code. Only if you explicitly go out of your way to refuse contributions to the software rather than to you do you, as the orginal author, retain rights to relicense the combined code. Tim Wilkerson has done precisely this with Kaffe, which is nominally under GPL. If this is the type of control you want, then a Sun/Java style license is the best way to achieve it (ie: JavaSoft, NPL, etc.); the failure of the Sun License was that it was not granted in perpetuity, which allwed Sun to shoot themselves in the foot in an attempt to capitalize on it, destroying the availability of the reference implementation. The history of TCP/IP shows us why a public reference implementation is necessary. Terry Lambert terry@lambert.org --- Any opinions in this posting are my own and not those of my present or previous employers. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-hackers" in the body of the message
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