google open phone platform

[Attila Csipa]

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.