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Light Table 0.7.0

lighttable.com

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Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#21

Post by ibdthor »

steveklabnik wrote: post #11
pnathan wrote: post #9

What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...

Many people, even some lawyers, don't understand the GPL. :/ It elicits this kind of knee-jerk reaction in people.

You are definitely correct that some of the aversion is a knee jerk reaction and misunderstanding, but that aside, the MIT license is very end user friendly, more understood than the GPL, and more permissive to the end user, plus we kept hearing from folks that that's what they wanted, so we switched.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#22

Post by steveklabnik »

ibdthor wrote: post #21
steveklabnik wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many people, even some lawyers, don't understand the GPL. :/ It elicits this kind of knee-jerk reaction in people.

You are definitely correct that some of the aversion is a knee jerk reaction and misunderstanding, but that aside, the MIT license is very end user friendly, more understood than the GPL, and more permissive to the end user, plus we kept hearing from folks that that's what they wanted, so we switched.

BSD is _developer_ friendly, not end-user friendly. In this case, your end users are developers, though...

The GPL sacrifices developer freedoms for end-user freedoms. I don't think it's any inherently more or less free. But then you get into discussions of what 'freedom' means...

I have written a ton of software licensed as each, and the tide is certainly turning toward the BSD. It just bums me out.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#24

Post by saidajigumi »

jamii wrote: post #16
deng wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I did not get that either. I also do not understand why the GPLv3 would necessitate a contributor agreement, but MIT would not. I always thought those agreements were necessary so that one institution has copyright and can change the license without getting approval from every author. That applies to any free license, doesn't it? Anyway, I think they just wanted to change to MIT before new authors commit withou…

The decisions were largely separate. The goal of having a CA was to leave us the option of selling commercial plugins in the future. We no longer plan to do that so we got rid of it. Separately, we kept hearing that the GPL is a hurdle to adoption at some companies so we switched to MIT.

Were these concerns over Light Table for internal use by these companies? If so, then that sounds a lot like ignorant fear-mongering, either by counsel or execs playing armchair IP lawyer. I understand resolving the "sales objection"; it's just disappointing to see these licensing misconceptions persisting.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#25

Post by pbreit »

pnathan wrote: post #9

What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...

People rightly or wrongly don't feel comfortable modifying GPL code. And don't see any benefits to GPL. That seems pretty straightforward to me.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#26

Post by cldwalker »

mberning wrote: post #3
ohfunkyeah wrote: post #2

Anyone know of a good update to the discussion that happened here? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3874324 I'm curious how the concept of light table has stacked up against reality in the past year.

Out of curiosity I just downloaded it and tried it out on a JS project I am working on. To me the biggest and most interesting feature is the evaluation of code anywhere, so I decided to try that. Aside from it needing a browser to do anything with JS I noticed that it generated a bunch of errors when I tried to evaluate a block of code. Maybe it is awesome for clojure, but for JS I think it has a long way to go. Bac…

I've been using JS eval fine. Feel free to open an issue on https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/issues as described in https://github.com/LightTable/LightTable/blob/master/CONTRIB...

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#27

Post by ibdthor »

btreecat wrote: post #17

I am not really sure what Light Table is and the announcement does not provide any information as such.

The blog posts might get a little long if we prefaced all of them with a description of Light Table, but hopefully lighttable.com can provide you with all the information you're looking for :)

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#28

Post by logn »

If you're going to do an MIT license, why not just Apache 2.0? That offers some protection against patent trolling. And the Apache license can still require an attribution notice like the MIT license.

Re: Light Table 0.7.0

#30

Post by iolsantr »

deng wrote: post #13
pnathan wrote: post #9

What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...

Yeah, I did not get that either. I also do not understand why the GPLv3 would necessitate a contributor agreement, but MIT would not. I always thought those agreements were necessary so that one institution has copyright and can change the license without getting approval from every author. That applies to any free license, doesn't it? Anyway, I think they just wanted to change to MIT before new authors commit withou…

The viral patent grant in gplv3 is very scary to companies that that hold a lot of patents. This seems to be a decent overview: http://www.internationallawoffice.com/newsletters/detail.asp...
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