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Numerio / Caya

Caya is a multiprotocol Instant Messaging client for Haiku.
http://www.versut.com/caya/
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Why the GPL license? #16

Open lbmn opened 7 years ago

lbmn commented 7 years ago

Licensing Haiku userland apps with the same permissive MIT license as the OS itself has advantages that could attract more interest to Haiku OS.

Haiku OS has the potential to fill the niche for people who philosophically disagree with restrictive copyleft licensing. For example, the only way to have a modern Web browser on top of BSD Unix without restrictive dependencies (ex. GTK, Qt) is to run Haiku and WebPositive in Bhyve.

I highly encourage all Haiku app developers to reconsider their reasons for using licenses like GPL.

pulkomandy commented 7 years ago

In the case of Caya, the reason is use of 3rd party GPL licensed code.

It used to be possible to build the GPLed code separately so the core could be distributed as plain BSD. But, this is more annoying than the GPL itself. You should still be able to strip the GPL code away and get a working app, but I don't think it is a good idea to support this as a standard.

Of course, if you submit patches to replace the 3rdparty GPL code with BSD licenced one, which is also working better or more up to date, we would consider it.

Numerio commented 7 years ago

The only parts of Caya which are GPL licensed are the addons, which can be easily replaced with something else. This is because the only libraries viable to be used were distributed with this license. I don't see personally a problem using GPL in an application like Caya for a variety of reasons. On the contrary, I think it's the most beneficial license and matter of fact it works. There are tons of successful projects out there which gained a fertile ecosystem thanks to the copyleft warranties of GPL. The first in the list would be GNU/Linux. When this argument show up, no one is able to make a serious point on why not use GPL, usually this looks like just a religion war. I don't see why MIT would attract more interest unless someone is interested in redistributing it with a less free license.

Anyway, I'm not personally against GPL or BSD-style either, but I will not accept rewrites of the add-ons just for this reason. i.e. without substantial improvements in both features and maintainability. I think it's better to focus on extending the application and fixing bugs.