[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

Todd Berman tberman@off.net
Tue, 13 Jul 2004 18:19:27 -0400


On Tue, 2004-07-13 at 18:13 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote:
<some snipage>
>     Which probably means that new widgetry (like the new Dock which is a
> complete rewrite) can fall under the MIT X11, and other components which
> are not entirely pieces of MonoDevelop, and could conceivably be used
> elsewhere.

Not sure about that, the new Dock itself is a derivative work
(potentially) of the GdlDock, which i believe is LGPL. I am not sure if
porting languages is enough to distinguish it as non-derivative or not.


Sigh. In general this sort of debate kills me. This is the #1 barrier to
getting open source products used (in my opinion). As a developer, all I
want is to write some cool code that kicks ass in some new way, and if
someone else can use it, great, lets do it. As a user, all I want to do
is use my computer functionally. Then licensing issues show up, and you
immediately potentially bar users and developers from your product.

To put it insanely clearly. If this licensing issue is not resolved, I
will be contractually *UNABLE* to continue any sort of code development
for MonoDevelop. Should this come to pass, I will be insanely pissed,
let me tell you. However, regardless *I* will continue to review
patches, provide help, triage bugzilla, and create code that is
absolutely beyond a doubt able to be useful, hopefully in the methods
described by Miguel.

Lets all get on the same page here. We all just want to write code, lets
make it happen.

--Todd