google open phone platform
Attila Csipa
plists at prometheus.org.yu
Tue Nov 6 12:29:32 CET 2007
On Monday 05 November 2007 22:16:03 Jeffrey Thomas wrote:
> >Why did you pick the Apache v2 open source license?
>
> Correct, its a developer-friendly licenses, as they put it. I prefer the
> GPL because its a USER-friendly license.
Let's not forget the group of users who were pretty vocal of the advantages of
OpenMoko NOT being completely GPL (i.e. having commercial apps on/linking to
it or it's toolkit). These folks said that they prefer OpenMoko to Qtopia
BECAUSE it did not require them to put their own software under the GPL.
These will be the users who want skin-deep freedom (=freedom for me, not
freedom all users), and that are likely to jump ship. The tough question is
how big this group actually is in the OpenMoko camp. OTOH, OpenMoko might
actually benefit from this, as this also means more OSS exposure to the
general public (even if somewhat skewed by large companies). There are two
reasons a company goes the apache/BSD license way - they don't want to give
back anything to the OSS community OR they do not want to be bothered with
license issues, Google being in the latter group in my impression.
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