Software licenses and releasing Python programs for review

[Andreas Kostyrka]

On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 01:57:25AM -0700, Robert Kern wrote:
> And for thoroughness, allow me to add "even if they have no intention or 
> desire to profit monetarily." I can't explain exactly why this is the 
> case, but it seems to be true in the overwhelming majority of cases. 
> Academic projects with non-commercial clauses languish in obscurity 
> while academic Open Source projects thrive. The contributors to the Open 
Well, it's easily explained. (Well at least my motivation in this case)
I do not touch things that I cannot use "generally" and being a
"commercial" IT consultant this basically means:
*) opensource is better than commercial payware.
   (because "for free" (as in beer) is usable in more contexts)
*) GPL is acceptable for much stuff, because I can install GPL'ed
   stuff for a customer.
*) GPL is not acceptable for "library" stuff, because as a software
   developer I'm sometimes forced to do "closed" stuff.
   (Yep, even nowadays there are place where it's basically a legal
    requirement.)

Implications:

*) qt is a bordercase: GPL for free, or commercial for pay. Not perfect but
   good enough. 
*) A number of O-R mappers for Python are of no relevance to me,
   because they are GPL. O-R mappers are development libraries.

The idea is that I'm mostly not interested in learning tools that are
not of general use.

So basically, stuff not meeting this criteria, is only interesting if
it's unique:

*) commercial stuff is only interesting if there is no competing
   open-source project.
*) GPL'ed "building blocks" are only interesting when there is no
   competing LGPL version. Example: OCR on Linux/Unix. There are no
   perfect solutions there so a GPL'ed solution might be
   ok. (Especially because one can use OCR without linking with a lib
   *grin*)

Andreas