Re: gEDA-user: Open Source mechanical CAD on the horizon

[Ales Hvezda <ahvezda@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

[snip]
>> http://chitlesh.wordpress.com/2009/11/24/some-licenses-kill-opensource-me=
>chanical-design-flows/
>
>Yes, there have been many times when I wanted to use a program for a
>larger project but it depended on opencascade. I do not like their
>license but what I really dislike is how they call it opensource.

Yeah, this is quite unfortunate.  A nice thread on Fedora's position (a
link from Chitlesh's blog):

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=459125

What is interesting too is that OpenCascade has been accepted into
Debian/Ubuntu into the main repository:

https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/karmic-changes/2009-May/000579.html

With the interesting changes:

   ...
   * Upstream replaced Triangle by a free implementation,
     thus external-triangle.patch is removed as well as
     dependencies against libtriangle-dev.
   ...
   * All non-free bits have thus been removed, and opencascade
     is moved from non-free into main.
   ...

One of the best discussions has been at:

http://www.opencascade.org/org/forum/thread_15859

The very last response/paragraph is most telling:

	So when Open CASCADE becomes LGPL (one day, hopefully) anyone
	making any modifications will have to license those modifications
	under LGPL, should he/she will to integrate it into the source
	base he/she must be ready to disclaim copyright claims. Yes,
	Open CASCADE is free to use those modifications in its commercial
	projects, just like anyone else here, and to deliver them to
	its paying customers ahead of others. So what ? It's fair,
	it's open source, isn't it ? I don't see a problem here.

"disclaim copyright claims"?  Sounds like Open CASCADE S.A.S. wants the
unfair advantage in taking code contributions and "delivering them to
paying customers ahead of others".  They want to control everything and
that doesn't seem very OSS friendly at all.  Either it is open source/free
software or it is _not_.

The more I think about it, the more I like the chaotic: "you contribute
something, you own the copyright to that something, and then nobody has
an advantage over anybody else".  The important lesson here is pick the
initial license carefully when starting a new project.

I've gone OT for geda-user, sorry.

				-Ales



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