[Fribidi-discuss] Re: FriBidi's license (was - my Bidi...)

[Shachar Shemesh]

Behdad Esfahbod wrote:

>On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:
>
>  
>
>>On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 19:39, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
>>    
>>
>>>by using or even writing our own Bidi
>>>      
>>>
>>/me is very shocked to hear that!
>>    
>>
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>/me is not shocked at all.
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>>Why in hell did we spend those many hours working on FriBidi's 100%
>>Unicode compatiblity if one will still need to write a new bidi engine
>>for many free software applications?
>>    
>>
>
>There are 10 kinds of application developers:
>
>  * Those who start their own bidi implementation
>  
>
Done that.

>  * Those who use FriBidi of ICU
>  
>
Switched to that. Am using ICU at the moment, and hating every second.

>>That's something to think about. I seriously believe we should change
>>the license to a more liberal license, and the Putty case is proof
>>enough.
>>
The Putty case proves nothing. I can understand someone not wishing for 
runtime dependancy on another library. Not wanting any compile time 
dependancy on an external library means that you, by definition, have to 
write your own. I don't think that's a case for fribidi's future in any way.

Of course, my entire contribution to fribidi thus far has been a single 
bug report, and suggesting a development direction for the "new 
interface" that nobody seems to like. I am not a copyright holder, and 
thus not one who's opinion binds anyone.

>No, I seriously believe the opposite.  I like the Copyleft, GPL,
>LGPL, and FSF.  And I want to walk in the road.  Why?  Because
>that's the way many great pieces of software are walking in:
>Linux, GNOME, blah, blah...
>
>  
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For whatever it's worth, it's a me too on this one. Notice that there is 
nothing to prevent any open source software of any license from using 
fribidi in any reasonable way, unless they say "they don't want compile 
time dependancy".

Putty can even put the entire fribidi source in a subdir in their 
source, and clearly state that this subdir is under a different license.

>BTW, in the case of PuTTY, there are a 10 things to consider:
>
>  * The weakest point in bidi support in PuTTY is not the bidi
>alg, but the semantics of the terminal.
>
>  * PuTTY is a no-op in Linux IMO
>  
>
Well, technically there is a Linux version of putty compiled using 
winelib. That was, however, done mostly to test winelib, and not to 
bring putty to Linux.

>  
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>>roozbeh
>>    
>>
>
>--behdad
>  behdad.org
>
>  
>
shachar

-- 
Shachar Shemesh
Lingnu Open Systems Consulting
http://www.lingnu.com/