[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

[Bernhard Spuida]

Hi,

> On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 07:17 +0200, Christoph Wille wrote:
> > We've decided to take this to the FSF, to get an independent and especially 
> > a professional clarification on this matter. I'm sure that everyone here 
> > agrees on the authority of the FSF in OS licensing issues.
> 
> Out of curiosity, what exactly are you taking to the FSF, because it
> seems like in the last 2 days, a lot of different issues/concerns
> regarding licensing have been touched upon.
> 
Your decision regarding to only accepting future contributions 
licensed under X11. This in our understanding has a number of issues 
affecting monodevelop in its entirety:

1) As the existing files are under GPL, and you now only accept X11, 
those files can no longer in any way be modified. This would be a 
very serious issue for the further development of MD unless of course 
you accept GPL'd contributions.

2) Add-ins that make use of the GPL'd interfaces, namespaces, methods 
etc. have to be licensed under the GPL as well. See 
<http://www.fsf.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#TOCGPLAndPlugins> as quoted 
in a previous email by me. In effect, your decision would prevent the 
development of add-ins making use of any part of the 
#develop/monodevelop add-in architecture.

3) Add-ins that do not in any way use or depend on the 
#develop/monodevelop infrastructure and which can be used in other 
programs are fine. I just cannot see how those would work (call me 
unimaginative if you like).

As I am quite certain that this is not exactly your interpretation of 
the issue at hand, we decided to ask the professionals.
Regards,

                 Bernhard Spuida
                 #develop senior word wrangler

365/24 - so expect support for only 15.208333 days a year