Re: [Chicken-hackers] Re: Backdoor GPL in message-digest

[Felix]

Hello!


I have created a ticket (#358) in the bug-tracker to collect any ideas
on how this should be implemented (and what). Please consider adding
some practical advice on how to go on about this.

It goes without saying that this whole licensing business is totally
absurd, crazy and monty-pythonesque. There a basically honorable idea
(making software free and trying to find a way of enforcing that) has
ended up in something that nobody understands and nobody knows how to
use, how to avoid or when it applies. Not even those who came up with
the idea in the first place.

I am working in the software industry for 8 years now, where a large
part was project work, so I had some insight into quite a bunch of
software projects. In my experience customer companies never gave the
slightest hoot about software licenses and whether they violated the
GPL or something. They didn't even know about software licenses.  We
tried to tell them, yet they seldom took it in any way seriously. I
don't write that to indicate that we shouldn't be careful about it,
but to show that in the real-world, the problem is practically
ignored. And I can understand that, because the world is already
complicated enough as it is.

So IMHO, this endless stream of words being written about the subject,
the lawyers being paid by the FSF trying to figure out what RMS wants,
the gigs of bandwidth being wasted with licensing discussions and
flamewars, the endless time being wasted thinking about it and trying
to somehow make it have sense - just a big lie, a sport, a
game. Something to waste time with. I'm doing it myself now, see?

I think we should (strongly) recommend to egg authors to use BSD or
MIT licenses for their code.


cheers,
felix