Re: New BK License Problem?

Larry McVoy
2002-10-05T15:05:12Z

I can tell that this issue isn't going away quickly so here are some
thoughts.

If the only thing that happens is a pile of complaints about how bad
the license is, the license isn't going to change.

Try and think about this from our point of view. We provide a complex
yet useful product for free. While doing so accomplishes our goal of
helping the kernel community, it also puts us at far greater risk that
someone will just reimplement the software. Creating this software
was quite difficult and we are not in the business of providing a
roadmap to our competitors, they get to find their own way.

If you want to suggest license changes do so showing that you understand
why we did what we did and show how your changes accomplish that in
a better way. Suggestions like "you guys are idiots, just GPL it and
you can make money from support" just get ignored. Suggestions which
increase, rather than decrease, our risk also get ignored.

If someone has a magic way of saying "you can use the software if and
only if your use of it does not put BitMover at financial risk" I'd
love to hear it. So far, however, what I'm hearing is "your license
screws me and I want you to change it". I hear your complaints,
but they are just noise because they are one-sided.

There are other ways to work out the problem. For example, the
openlogging stuff doesn't work for researchers. We make a standard
practice of providing waivers to institutions or groups who are doing
pure research (not work for hire for BigFatCompany, Inc). There is no
reason we can't do that for you for the non-compete clause. We're
in the process of developing that language for IBM's Linux Technology
Center, we can reuse it for anyone else.

Unless someone can come up with language which protects us, the license
stands as is. We'll do waivers for kernel developers who happen to
work at Rational or whatever as needed. It's no different than dealing
with patents by Red Hat or whoever, if you are concerned about it, you
can ask us to make our intentions clear to you personally in writing.
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Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitmover.com/lm