Comments on: 1 Week, 10,000 Downloads Later

By: mozey

mozey — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 23:06:00 +0000

EXCELLENT work, very ellegent, nice, and powerful, hats off!, on again, then back off.

By: mozey

mozey — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 18:06:00 +0000

EXCELLENT work, very ellegent, nice, and powerful, hats off!, on again, then back off.

By: Michael

Michael — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 10:44:51 +0000

I appreciate all you are saying, and it seems completely reasonable. But, the company I work for is one of the larger ones in this world, and it is highly unlikely that they would change this position. As I said, one of the reason preferring the Apache and Eclipse licenses is because of the strict governance in those communities that gives us more comfort with issues like pedigree–so while you can say that only people from 280 North employees are the only contributors and that you follow best practices, apparently that is not good enough. It sucks, but that is the way it is. To be fair, I should say that these are guidelines, not strict rules, and if there was a pressing need to use LGPL software, and someone was willing to spend the necessary amount of time with our lawyers to make it happen, it is possible to get an exception granted. It would be such a monumental effort, unfortunately, that it is unlikely to happen. My organization is way too small to make something like that happen, so it would really need to come from a product group. Our loss, really!

By: boucher

boucher — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 02:12:41 +0000

Hey Michael,

Although i can't convince your management for you, I can offer a few clarifications. Under the LGPL, your company (and any other) can distribute any proprietary application they like built on top of Cappuccino. Releasing source code is not required. The only scenario under which releasing source code would be necessary is if you created a modified version of Cappuccino, and in that case only the modifications to Cappuccino would need to be released.

As for the Apache group's comment, the statement only refers to the incompatibility between the Apache license and the LGPL, which mainly stems from the fact that the Apache license has additional restrictions regarding patents and patent lawsuits, which the LGPL does not.

As of now, the only contributors to Cappuccino are employees of 280 North, and as we add contributions by new individuals, we plan to follow the best practices in the open source community, including documenting contributions with contributor license agreements. In other words, there's nothing to worry about. I hope your management comes around.

By: Michael

Michael — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 17:04:11 +0000

Unfortunately, though I had been pushing to use Cappucino/Objective-J in our company, LGPL is a no-go. A quote from management:

"3rd party LGPL code is still troubling for [our company] to distribute, and if you're ever planning to transfer your code to [the product group] to be included in a product then I should let you know that [the product group] would not likely distribute 3rd party LGPL."

and
"[the product group] likes to keep the 3rd party OSS they distribute confined to Apache & Eclipse, not only because of the license, but also because of the strict governance in those communities that gives us more comfort with issues like pedigree"

This is in line with the Apache Group's stand:

* Which licenses may NOT be included within Apache products?
...
GNU LGPL 2, 2.1, 3
...

Oh well.