[darcs-users] Re: Darcs API?

Jamie Webb j at jmawebb.cjb.net
Sun Apr 17 11:16:25 UTC 2005


On Sun, Apr 17, 2005 at 11:43:14AM +0200, Leif Frenzel wrote:
> > Personally, unless you give me at least the rights the GPL gives me, I'm
> > probably not interested in your app anyway.  So why would you not
> > release a plugin under GPL?
> It restricts my rights still too much, namely, my rights to choose a license
> and (more important) to choose which rights I want to give others who use my
> software.

Trouble is, by choosing the GPL, David has made a decision (as is
/his/ right) not to allow Darcs to be used in commercial software. The
EPL is more permissive than the GPL. Thus if you were able to include
Darcs in an EPL-licensed program, someone else could then make a
commercial program out of it, violating David's wishes.

The viral nature of the GPL is bad, but unfortunately given the stance
that ones code should be freely available but should not be exploited
commercially, it's inevitable. You can't say 'you can't use this
commercially, but can release this code under another open-source
license', because a weaker license would remove the 'copyleft'.

Having said that, I think allowing commercial distribution of Darcs
with certain restrictions would be a good thing to encourage uptake.
Probably what is wanted is a requirement that the distributed darcs be
an unmodified 'official' version (and hence repository compatible; no
'embrace and extend'), and that users be made aware that it is Darcs
under the hood.

David and the other contributors could do that by releasing Darcs
under a second license, independent of the GPL, but that doesn't solve
your problem of course. I'm not sure it's possible to solve your
problem unless the contributors all decide that actually they aren't
interested in copyleft.

-- Jamie Webb




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