91–100 of 109 posts
It would be cool to see some videos of the current LightTable, since it was the demo videos of the original prototype that made its name originally. FWIW I remember trying LT once post-open sourcing and ran out of enthusiasm before I could figure out how to see any of the "cool stuff from the video".
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The EPL is incompatible with GPL, so you lose another group.
That makes sense, but then it begs the question of why Light Table was originally distributed under the GPL, i.e. since it's built from EPL'd software... and the GPL is incompatible with the EPL, as you say. Does Light Table's new MIT license insulate developers from EPL-GPL compatibility concerns that might arise from the EPL'd pieces (Clojure/Script, et al.) used to build it?
The MIT license is compatible with almost everything - it's really very minimal, comparable to a 2-clause BSD-style license. There is no problem combining MIT licensed components with EPL licensed components, or with GPLed components. (Of course there is still a problem if you want to combine with both at the same time)
What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...
Companies might WANT to ship it, enhance it, sell proprietary plugins for it, etc.
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Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?". Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many other such products still survive just fine.
Er yes Linux has been made into many products, like those Android phones. Several companies sell gcc as a commercial product, eg for embedded systems - its open source but you pay for support for your CPU architecture etc.
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Before asking how, ask "are they planning to turn it into a business?". Neither Emacs, gcc or even Linux have been made into a product. They and many other such products still survive just fine.
True, but Emacs, gcc and Linux didn't take millions of VC dollars.
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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.
It's not about end-user freedom at all. The GPL is there to establish the freedom of the code itself. For the end-user it's irrelevant what license a product uses. They buy a polished, boxed product; they don't download source code, set up the code's build requirements and then compile it. The only practical benefit of open source products for the end-user is that there may be forks of it which could have an impact o…
GPL and BSD/MIT-style licenses are not equivalent in this regard, because code under BSD/MIT-style licenses is not obligated to be either easily attainable or modifiable. You can ship binaries and not release source code.
You can profit from GPL code. MySQL is perhaps the best example but there are others.
Keeping the source open is a big deal, because communities and projects can die otherwise. More than a few game mods, for example, have died because the developers closed the source to mitigate cheating, and then stopped developing the game altogether. Under the GPL, this could never happen.
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The important point is that they have a CLA and that one contains copyright assignment. The company behind LightTable holds all rights on your contributions. As the copyright holder, they can change the license however they wish.
Well, a good CLA should prevent them from going non-free.
What issue could possibly exist for using a GPL editor? It's not being shipped from a company...
I don't think 'shipped' has been clearly defined in court. Let say you extend it in-house, contractors move in, and you let them install the modified development environment on their laptops. Do you have to give them your changes upon request, licensed under the GPL? Also, if you make a web-based product based on this, and a customer insists on hosting it in its cloud (many do because they do not want to, or in pract…
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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.
Why would people not feel comfortable modifying GPL code? The entire goal of the license is to allow people to make and distribute modified versions.