[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

[Todd Berman]

On Thu, 2004-07-15 at 16:14 +0200, Bernhard Spuida wrote:
> If you want to see the wording of the inquiry, please refer to this:
> 
> <http://www.dotnetgerman.com/blogs/rackechs/default.aspx?date=2004-07-
> 15>
> 

Sigh. Dude, you 2 have come close to doing something that years of lame
users have never been able to do.

That pdf is a gross misrepresentation of what I said, and it is heavily
skewed.

First of all, I never said that without explicitly choosing a license,
the code is license free. It's license is just not explicit which is a
BAD THING.

Second, a lot of the code I am speaking about is in now way derived from
any GPL'd code in #D. You don't have a completion engine anything like
ours, you don't have hordes of gtk# widgetry, you don't have a service
to tie into the debugger, or pkg-config, or monodoc. We have a lot of
code that isn't derivative in any way, and we have even more code that
has been basically completely rewritten from line 1 to line n.

At no point has anyone suggested to change the licensing on the code
that *I* don't own. Note, I am not including any MonoDevelop contributor
but myself into this group. I am the only party that is currently
licensing their code as MIT X11 WHERE APPLICABLE.

At this point, I don't think contacting the FSF is worth your energy, as
we have decided to solve this issue in what I feel is a very interesting
and inventive way. And 100% within the constraints the GPL puts us
under.

I would suggest that you guys do some reading about the GPL and what it
really means, as no one who has read this ongoing thread has agreed with
some of your interpretations of the GPL. And these are guys who have
been involved with opensource since netscape open sourced the mozilla
codebase. They know licenses, they are aware of lots of particulars, and
they are (in my opinion) a far more reliable source of information on
licensing than a small german company attempting to use the GPL to push
a business model.

--Todd

PS - Sigh, dbl email issues again. One day I will get this multiple email account stuff right.