[POLITICAL] Re: [Fribidi-discuss] License question to the pro ject owners

[Omer Zak]

My worry is not about people, who take the software and use it.

My worry is about people, who submit improvements to the software but
impose such licensing terms that would make it impossible for me to
legally use their improvements with software, to which I contributed, and
which I use as well.

The MPL appears to have loopholes, which would allow programmers from
country A to submit improvements, and license them to all the world EXCEPT
for country B.  Using the software in country B would then be in violation
of law.  Even if country B's laws would have excused them from respecting
those discriminatory license restrictions, the restrictions would make it
more difficult for country B software users to do business with other
countries.

The LGPL does not have such loopholes.  If anyone tries to restrict the
license of derivative of a LGPLed software package, then he would be in
violation of the LGPL and his restrictions won't hold.
                                             --- Omer
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On Sun, 13 Jul 2003, VisualMind wrote:

> Anyway, The idea I want to explain is that choosing to make a software (or
> abs. anything) to be an opensource (no matter what the license is) means you
> trust whoever use it to respect that license and that also means there's a
> risk which regards those who respect no license (even if a commercial one, or
> highly protected).
>
> In other words: we (I talk about myself and the Arabic programmaers I know
> plus a lot of other ones I hear about) do respect the software license we are
> using while paying no attention to where it comes from, although yes there
> are people (really few ratio) who don't respect the license (not just Arabs)
> but these also don't respect any thing so no matter what the license is; they
> really won't care.
>
> And IMO it is so ridiculous to to say that having this license or another
> would make (SOME RACE) use it badly or not, if it's so imporant and you worry
> about that why did you make it an opensource in the first place? you already
> put it in risk.
>
> Opensource software are dedicated to those who respect the effort of others
> regardless of thier countries and the license being used.
>
> There's a big difference between programmers and users, programmers in Arabic
> world know what it means to respect the author rights, and when I said
> there's a contempt I meant it was showing a defaced picture about us.
>
> Regards,
> Salah Faya