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Re: A priori IPR choices

2007-10-25 08:44:01
On Thu, Oct 25, 2007 at 10:58:32AM +1300, Brian E Carpenter wrote:
On 2007-10-25 08:32, Ted Hardie wrote:
At 10:02 AM -0700 10/24/07, Lawrence Rosen wrote:
Ted Hardie wrote:
And that will never fly (IANAL) with the GPL and so here we sit at an
impasse again.  So either a GPL implementation is important to
interoperability in a given space or it is not.  If it is important to
interoperabilty, then this is a showstopper.  If not, maybe not.
Hope that helps restore context for you.

I would argue that a GPL implemention is not important to
interoperability testing as long as there is a BSD-licensed
implementation.  In fact, to the extent that all or most of the
commercial products are based off of the same BSD-licensed code base,
this can actually *improve* interoperability.  (I may have been
awarded the 2006 FSF Award for the Advancement of Free Software, but
if my goal were to make sure that specification was going to get
widely adopted, I'd use a BSD license, not a GPl license, for the
reference implementation.)

Of course there can be are problems when the reference implementation
doesn't quite jibe with the formal printed specification, but that is
true regardless how the reference implementation is licensed.

                                                 - Ted

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