Re: Any update on Mckoi's status?

["Richard S. Hall" <heavy@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Alexander Molochnikov wrote:
> I never said McKoi was "no good". Rather, I believe it is its future 
> that is in question.

Yes, I didn't mean to put words in your mouth.

> I, for one, would never attempt to keep the ball rolling on something 
> that has two licenses, one GPL, and one commercial. First, the 
> ambiguity of licensing will have to be resolved, with the commercial 
> license dropped. Second, I would not touch the GPLed stuff either. It 
> is too restrictive for the third party to carry on the development, 
> and usually is a big NO-NO in any commercial environment.

Well, I am no big fan of GPL either, but there is no difficulty in 
continuing the development of the GPL-licensed code...that is the whole 
point of GPL. The only restriction that GPL places on people who fork is 
that they have to keep the license GPL too. For many people, GPL is the 
license of choice for this very "viral" reason.

The dual-licensing scheme is a hedge-your-bets open source strategy by 
many companies, when they still want to try to sell licenses. Of course, 
many are surprised to find out that their work can still be forked if 
they are not responsive to the community. That is why perhaps a better 
strategy is to only open source infrastructure or middleware and keep 
higher level services proprietary...but that is a whole other discussion.

> If McKoi is to be given a new life, it would have to be rebranded as 
> LGPL first. But with the original developers being absent, this is 
> pretty much dead in the water.

Well, you are making a statement of religion, not technology. Many 
people prefer GPL over every other license, many people don't. I agree 
that this could limit mckoi being embedded in other products that do not 
want GPL, but for those that just use JDBC, they might be able to work 
around this.

-> richard

>  
> Alex Molochnikov
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Richard S. Hall" <heavy@ungoverned.org>
> Date: Monday, January 28, 2008 4:37 pm
> Subject: Re: Any update on Mckoi's status?
> To: mckoidb@mckoi.com
>
> > Alexander Molochnikov wrote:
> > > The silence is deafening...
> > I think that is not the right way to look at it. There are lots
> > of people that take over "dead" or "non-responsive" projects, e.g.,
> > AtheOS->Syllable, Handbrake->MediaFork (now merged back in),
> > Compiere->Adempiere, etc.
> >
> > As I said, "dead" doesn't equate to "not good", sometimes people
> > just run out of time.
> >
> > -> richard