[LINK] Squiz - MySource Matrix Licence

[Robert Hart]

On Thu, 2005-04-28 at 10:10 +1000, Deus Ex Machina wrote:
> maybe becuase gpl is a piece of shit license model that forces you
> to loose rights in order to redistribute any derivative products.

Squiz is not using the GPL - please at least get the facts straight.

> Robert is seems you are yourself well aware of restriction of commercial rights,
> this Robert is from your business web site:
> 
> http://www.interweft.com.au/CNotice.html
> 
> " Copyright in the works on the http://www.interweft.com.au web-site is
> owned by Interweft
> 
> In order to use these materials for profit, you must gain approval from
> this company in writing, by application to Interweft . Such licences may
> be subject to the payment of a licence fee and will generally be subject
> to the conditions listed below. ....
> 
> the work is not to be presented in such a manner that it could be
> inferred to be the property of some person or organisation other than
> this company. "
> 
> Robert that is absolute hypocrisy (did I spell that right yet?)

Sigh - trying not to feed the trolls, but you might like to note that
there are significant differences between the source code of a piece of
software and a document on a technical issue. If you bothered to read
you would find that using the documents I place on my web site is pretty
non-onerous.

But the point is it is my work and I get to choose how I licence it. I
would also draw your attention to the fact that I specifically do make
money from open source software - and there is absolutely no bar
(ethically or legally) to doing so.

Squiz has chosen to licence their software as 'open source' - and in
doing so have taken on the full range of issues associated with open
source, which includes (very rarely if you care to research the issue)
forking a project.

> I would like to "wrest" control of your web site because I dont like
> the way its going. Robert why dont you practice what you preach?

(Punctuation police alert - it is "don't" Vic - twice on one sentence is
laziness and not a typo :-)

I do indeed practice what I perach - and in so doing I have the great
advantage that I can sleep at night without having to contort my ethics
into a pretzel.

> is open source good enough to trash software businesses but god forbid
> you are not going to trash or sully your business by giving away your stuff
> for nothing to anyone without you missing out on your cut.

Please go and look at Red Hat - this is a company that ONLY distributes
open source software. Last time I looked they had a market
capitalisation of about US$2 billion. There is abolutely nothing wrong
with making money - ethically and legally (and for your edification, the
two are most assuredly not synonymous).

Vic, if you search the net you will find a whole sequence of docs that I
wrote for the Linux documentation project. These are issued under a
'free for all licence' and I have made nothing directly out of these.
However, they most definitely contributed indirectly to my consulting
revenues and also to Red Hat hiring me way back in 1997.

The point is that I choose the licence under which I make available my
work - as does Squiz.

If Squiz does not want its software to be open source that is absolutely
their choice - but if they do, then they do so knowingly. By the way, if
a fork occurs it does not stop the original project maintainers from
continuing in their own direction - just that there are now two version
of the software out there and the market (the one you keep bleating to
us about) will decide which is the best.

If it is not Squiz's intention to make their software open source, that
is just fine by me - it is their software after all! But if it is not
open source then it should not be described as such. (Please note: I
have reservations about their licence - but I am not the one to say that
it is or is not open source, that will be decided by the OSI as I have
already made clear).

Goodness Vic, you are just so boringly predictable and ill-informed that
you are perilously close to your very own entry in the blacklist on my
server's spamassassin setup!

-- 
Robert Hart                                      hartr at interweft.com.au
+61 (0)438 385 533
Brisbane, Australia                        http://www.hart.wattle.id.au