Being a pain in the arse….
November 13th, 2005 by HenTJ commented on the pain I’ve inspired on the Roller development mailing list recently - link: blog.tjworld.net.
Namely that with two releases that want to be made (1.3 and 2.0), I’m asking questions about LGPL and BCL dependencies/files. Namely that we need to have it made very clear that we can release with the LGPL dependencies.
There are a couple of problems at the root of all this, as I’m sure most people know.
- Open source is split into two camps; “keep it free” GPL and “freedom to close” BSD. The two principles cannot be reconciled but they can overlap in various ways. Also there are licenses that sit between the two; MPL/CPL.
- People love to sue; who wants to find themselves bankrupt because they failed to do something correctly in legal terms.
Being an individual and being sued is not hugely likely as few of us have enough assets to be worth legal action; however if it did happen we would all find ourselves in dire straits. Joining a larger organization, like the ASF, helps to provide legal protection. However, that same larger organization are now a much better target for legal attack, even if the individual is protected, so said larger organization needs to be doing some work to protect itself.
Even so, there’s not a lot in it for a legal attack on the organization; not a lot of money and at best you’d just cause some press noise and infrastructure problems. The juicy target are the downstream users;