Horde3D

Call me stupid, but I'm struggling with git, when working with the android source code, and I find it very much confusing and don't like it at all.

Try Mercurial (the client is called 'hg'). I find it much more flexible than git, and it has an interface designed to be very similar to SVN.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Interestign news re our own licensing discussions: OGRE Will Switch To The MIT License from 1.7

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

I use mercurial with tortoisehg and its pretty damn good.

On the subject of licensing, I think theyre making a good choice there. I also think the analysis of the reasons why someone contributes to a codebase is right. Doing it by license is simply silly and does the reverse of what its meant to do.

Good on them.

I doubt that this is a good decision. Chances are high that Ogre might lose its identity and be nothing more than a cheap spare parts depot. Everyone can rip out a few parts of Ogre now that he is too lazy to write and use them in their own engine. You never know how much Ogre a product actually is.

Sure, they will increase their use base and maybe get a few more commercial projects. But what's the point of that? The main reason for me to appreciate commercial usage is that it is a proof of a certain quality or professionalism that an open source project has. But if nothing is coming back at all, you don't know how much they had to modify the engine to make it work for them.

I think the EPL that we have is the perfect balance. It is very liberal, you can use the engine in whatever way you want and you can extend it without having to release any of your code. It is only, if you find that a core interface is not powerful enough or a bug or some basic optimization that can be done, that you need to reveal this. IMO this is what helps to improve the quality of Horde. After all the focus of this project is quality, and not getting the most users for any price.

It really boils down to trust. MIT suggests you trust users to contribute where they think is appropriate. Any other license (aside from BSD) means you dont trust them to do that and want to try to force them via legal means to do so. Not that it matters unless you are prepared to pay the money to enforce it, which I guess nobody actually does.

I'm an MIT/BSD kind of guy I guess. I dont care if someone makes money from my work, more power to them. Not that I've released anything recently that anyone would want to use mind you

I think you may be a little too cynical about users - after all, it is in the users own best interest to contribute back to the project. Of course users can fork a project (and this happens even to GPL software), but as soon as they produce a non-compatible fork (doesn't matter whether public or private), they cease to benefit from development to the trunk.

Look at Python, an open source project with a completely free license (i.e. not copy-left). Google, Sun, Yahoo, Apple, and many more companies develop Python very heavily, but they all contribute their changes back to trunk. Why? Because they benefit from each other's changes, and they are unlikely to develop something so ground-breaking that the other companies (or the open-source community) can't reproduce it in a very short time.

As to Horde's license, I am perfectly happy with the current EPL. As far as contributors go, though, how many people actually contribute? By my count, about 4 or 5, and I doubt any of them do only because of the license

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Please don't get me wrong. I don't mistrust anyone in our community. Everyone here is very helpful and friendly, especially our regular members and I'm very happy about that.

I fully agree that an active and healthy community is much more important than forcing people to give out code. I wouldn't see a problem with a less restrictive license for the guys that are here. It is rather people that don't even register in the forums and might just take the code where I want some - at least formal - protection. But anyway, I think the EPL is a good license and I don't see a downside for anyone in the active community.

[First, I did not read all (it's quite huge), so I'm sorry if the answer is in this thread]

As Horde3D is now under the Eclipse Public License, I suppose this license also applies for the community SVN branch ?
Here : http://www.horde3d.org/wiki/index.php5? ... ity_Branch -> "We can only accept code that is distributed under the LGPL license and assume that your submission is under that license." -> should it be changed to "EPL" instead ?

Yeah we need to change that part in the wiki. However, Volker and me can't just put everything in the Community Branch under the EPL since only the contributers can do that, or we need at least the agreement from the contributers. For the Horde SDK this was not a problem since there were just a few contributions other than bugfixes and these got completely refactored by us over time.

Is there a plan to contact all contributors for them to change the license ? Or will there be code under the LGPL and code under the EPL in the same branch ?

As for my very little contribution (i.e. D native binding), you can assume it is LGPL or EPL, at your convenience ^^

I guess we will be too lazy to take the administrative work of finding all contributions and contacting everyone...
Although the amount of contributions is still manageable.


Thanks a lot, that's good. The EPL is definitely the preferred license now and I think we should only accept code under that or an extremely permissive license in the future (e.g. the WTFPL).

Hum, I am sorry to bring the question of the license back again, but I just read that the EPL is not compatible with the GPL on GNU's website : http://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html
They talk about a "weak copyleft", but I do not see exactly what they mean by that...

I think this is a problem for Horde, as in the free software community, the GPL is very popular, and it makes impossible to create a project using Horde and published under the GPL...

From the very page you linked:
If you are still using v2 of the GPL, well, time to upgrade, as v2 has several gaping legal holes with respect to dynamic linking and patent infringements.

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Tristam MacDonald - [swiftcoding]

Sorry if I'm slow off the mark, but what's the relationship between the Apache license and the EPL?