Re: Re: [avr-chat] µC/avr crypto lib

[Dustin Lang]

Hi,

I think "open" might be too vague and loaded a term to really discuss 
licensing issues.

What's the best possible outcome for an open-source developer?  For me, 
it's that people use my code and contribute the results back to me, which 
makes the code better, more people use it, ... and we solve a problem.

GPL is great in that it enforces, to the entent possible (*), that if the 
code is used for something, then the community benefits from that use. 
The problem is in that "if" -- commercial organizations often avoid using 
GPL code at all because they know that if they do, they'll be force to 
release other parts of their code.  That hurts -- code that isn't used by 
anyone doesn't help anyone.

BSD removes that barrier -- hence you could say it's more "open" to being 
used -- but it doesn't guarantee that the community benefits from this 
use.  Its strategy is to catch more traffic, even if the return on that 
traffic is smaller (and not guaranteed). (**)

(*) Within the constraints of current legal systems.  In my mind, the 
biggest weakness of the GPL is that it only restricts *distribution* of 
the code.  If a commercial entity runs the code as a web service, for 
example, they can do whatever they want with it -- they're not 
distributing the code, just the results of running the code.  Apparently 
GPLv3 tries to do something about that.  I admit to not having spent the 
time to get to the bottom of GPLv3.

(**) In practice, I suspect that a significant part of the reason that 
commercial users contribute code back is so that they can keep up with 
changes to the public codebase without having to merge in their private 
changes in the future!

Just my thoughts :)

dustin.