Re: Recommendation for a CL data structures library

[Raffael Cavallaro]

On 2010-03-22 10:52:58 -0400, John Hasler said:

> You assume that everyone has maximum adoption as their primary goal.

I assume that the author's goal is maximizing the amount of open source 
- and in fact, it is Pascal's stated goal - that others who use his 
library will open their source code for him to see and use - a 
perfectly reasonable desire. I just don't think anyone whose source is 
closed is going to open that source code simply to use a library - if 
they are constrained not to open their source, they simply won't use 
GPL libraries.

In order to accomplish this primary goal - greater amounts of open 
source - you need users and contributors. Possibly counterintuitively, 
the goal of maximizing open source is actually better accomplished by 
*not* choosing the GPL. The GPL drives potential users away, and 
potential users are potential contributors, bug fixers, etc. Instead, 
these potential users will become users of some other library which is 
LGPL, or BSD, etc. licensed, and they will become open source 
contributors to those other libraries, not to the GPL licensed project.

Again, recognition of this dynamic is what drove the creation of the 
Library GPL (now the Lesser GPL) in the first place.

warmest regards,

Ralph


--
Raffael Cavallaro