[MonoDevelop] Licensing concerns.

[Christoph Wille]

We intentionally linked only messages that were sent on this mailing list 
to not misquote you or anybody else, I invite everyone to check the PDF out 
to see the "misrepresentation" you allege.

Secondly, a minor mistake - don't take German language for German company. 
Here in Austria we also speak German as a matter of fact. Oh, and by the 
way: my company only acts as the copyright holder - all assignments will be 
tranferred to Mike once he chooses so. This is only legal protection for 
Mike, because he is a student and with Germany being heavy on not-so-easily 
defendable injunctions, I decided to offer a legal shield. Which is cheap, 
because my father IS a lawyer.

I thought we we were handling this issue (which even might turn out to be a 
non-issue) above-USENET flamewar level, but your recent blog post has me 
thinking that I might be wrong on assuming that we deal with this issue 
professionally.

Final words: we submit to the outcome from FSF analysis, so why doesn't 
everyone here hold their flame-breath and stick to "we have a disagreement 
on licensing we want to resolve professionally". To clear up 
misconceptions: we are not threatening anybody, we don't intend to mess 
with somebody's IP, it's just that this discussion has come to a point 
where it should be resolved professionally - so other OS projects don't 
have to go through this process but can build on the results.

Chris

At 06:38 PM 7/15/2004, Todd Berman wrote:
>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.