On Wed, 2004-08-04 at 02:55, Rui Miguel Seabra wrote: > On Mon, 2004-08-02 at 14:09 -0400, Miguel de Icaza wrote: > > I can not speak for Evolution, but I can speak for Mono, another > > component that we own the copyright to. > > > > We want to keep the copyright for various reasons: > > * We can relicense the code to someone on proprietary terms. > > * It allows us to build proprietary features if we choose to. > > This two are reason enough for not wanting to take even a slight look at > mono. In this whole discussion, this is surely the most important point. In my opinion the red tape of signing a few pieces of paper is minor. Donating code to a company who may use it in proprietary products? That is exactly what the GPL is trying to avoid. > > > That being said, in the context of Evolution being part of the GNOME > > platform and looking at the worst possible case: if the owner of > > Evolution would ever decide something that the community does not agree > > with, or decides to invest purely on a proprietary version, the > > community has the power to fork it. > ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ > > Has the freedom to do it, not necessarily the power in that it needs a > better skill. Who's the employer of most (if not all) of the main > coders, who are extremely familiar with the source code? But more importantly, forking will still leave the donated code in the proprietary product the company (be it Ximian, or Novell, or whoever will buy Novell in the future) chooses to sell. Andreas -- Prof. Dr. Andreas J. Guelzow Dept. of Mathematical & Computing Sciences Concordia University College of Alberta
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