[Rule-list] Thoughts on licensing

[Marco Fioretti]

Hello,

some discussion came up about using GPL vs BSD vs something else as a
license for miniconda, slinky, and whatever else we will do.

Personally, I feel no religious obligation to force only and always
one or another of them. As a matter of fact, I'm looking at this
thread as a wonderful occasion to learn more about the real
differences and similarities among free licenses, and thank in advance
who will provide relevant URLs.

There are several things, however, that we should not forget about
RULE and licensing.

1) miniconda: if it comes from anaconda, which is, IIRC, GPL, can't it
   be GPL only? I mean, do we have any room to manoeuver here?
   
2) Same as above about slinky: where does it come from, license-wise?

3) There is one thing I have pretty strong feelings about, and is to not make
   anything that will prevent Red Hat to merge (at least) the
   installer in their official product some day. This is not because I
   couldn't use RULE otherwise (of course I could!), because I have any
   obligation towards Red Hat (I have no RH stocks, and, in general,
   while having nothing whatsoever against for profit corporations,
   don't even feel the urge to help them for free), or because RH
   needs help from me or any other private person.

The reasons why I really hope they include our work are:

1) It is good that a NASDAQ corporation recognizes the existence of
   different kinds of customers, rather than looking only at the
   wealthier ones.

2) Equal opportunities: if a school has only junk HW resurrected by
   miniconda and friends, I want it to have access to the same
   official, paid, gold class commercial support that for Fortune 500
   companies is just one of many budget voices. I have this picture of
   a poor guy and some Silicon Valley CIO sitting in the same waiting
   room of the IT support services with the same dignity, because they
   were both able to purchase and use the same top-notch kind of
   support. Yes, real world help desk can be a very different beast,
   but I like that picture a lot anyways

'nuff said, your turn to comment :-)

	Ciao,
		Marco Fioretti
		RULE project leader    
-- 
Technological progress has merely provided us with more efficient
means for going backwards.  -- Aldous Huxley

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