From: Hartmut Niemann <niemann@cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de>
  To  : ggi Mailingliste <ggi-develop@eskimo.com>
  Date: Wed, 16 Sep 1998 09:47:44 +0200 (MESZ)

Licenses and stubborn people

Hi!
I have been pushing this topic a couple of times, and every
time I get the impression that after 40 messages everybody thinks
all are agreeing on *his* opinion or something like that.

We have been thru all this before, but we have not reached 
anything yet.
We are exchanging the same arguments over and over, and there
is no sign that anybody of the avid posters moves one angstroem.

Hey folks, without a license agreement we will get NOWHERE!
We won't get a beta release out ANYTIME.

If nobody of you moves his *** and is willing to find a consensus,
this project will die a horrible death. This year.

I was called 'radical' by someone (and I am proud of it :-), so I can say
it again:
Some day (SOON!) we'll need a license under which we'll publish
our code, and all those who don't like it must decide for themselves
whether they leave or not. We lose less than five coders for *any*
solution proposed yet. Or we lose a complete and interesting project.

And IMHO those people who do the programming
should have the power to decide the license (Andy, Steffen, Core, Marcus,
Jason, Andrew, Matthias, Jonas, all the driver maintainers I forgot).

<personal attacks>
Dear Wouter! If we can't agree on a license at all, the BSD crowd
won't get ANYTHING. If we agree on something *GPLed, they *can*, if they
want, use it. BTW: Is there an indication that they are
all as stubborn as you?

Dear LGPL-rules crowd!
You say we want that improvements to our code must be free.
We will NEVER be able to enforce that! Or would you (yes, you, the 
GPL-liking hobby programmer or lurker) sue Caldera, Red Hat, Sun, 
Microsoft, IBM, anybody for copyright violation?
So (L)GPLing software is  a political statement. It's not legally
enforceable I believe.
</personal attacks>

I am tired of this discussion. 

Hartmut.
--  
Hartmut Niemann   --   niemann(a)cip.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de
http://cip2.e-technik.uni-erlangen.de:8080/hyplan/niemann/index_en.html [/ggi]