Richard Rauch wrote:

> (You wouldn't be the same Chris Gray who wrote the Draco compiler, would
> you?)

Sorry, no.  Nor am I the Amiga games programmer, nor do I review country
music for the Austin Chronicle. :)

>
> If the company is only opening the source to the version of a procut one
> step behind the current release, then something like the GPL (or perhaps
> even more restrictive) makes sense:

We've already ruled that out as too "yucky".

> [...]
>
>
> If the intent is to kick off a bit of code that the company doesn't want
> to continue supporting (at least not without receiving lots of consulting
> fees), [...]
>

Do you mind?  This my baby you're talking about :)

>
> If the company is embracing the spirit of open source as a guiding
> principle, however, then I would make at least the following points:
> Either license will permit and encourage independant development.
> However, the GPL doesn't seem to mix well with other licenses.  While
> there wouldn't be much to keep a GNU/LINUX group, say, from adopting and
> working on a Berkely-licensedpiece of software, the GPL would be a major
> problem with brining the same code into a BSD camp.  Additionally, on the
> grounds of ethics, the GPL tries to dictate the rights that later authors
> have over their own work on derivatives; the Berkeley license leaves each
> person free to judge for themselves.
>

Yes, that's basically my reservation about the GPL. Unfortunately I am
surrounded by people who habitually make such statements as "Linux now
leads Unix development", so incompatibility with (say) NetBSD ain't going
to worry them much: and of course all BSD distributions include GPL'd
userland anyway, so we wouldn't be cutting ourselves off completely.

I think life becomes more interesting when people want to statically link
our VM with proprietary code (many embedded products don't support
dynamic linking).  With GPL that is impossible, with BSD it's no problem.

>
> Well, those are my first thoughts on the subject.  Admittedly, they don't
> go too deep, but you didn't say how stuck you were for ideas.  (^&

Maybe I wan't too sure myself how stuck I was. :0

Thanks,

Chris