On 2/1/06, Austin Ziegler <halostatue / gmail.com> wrote:
> On 01/02/06, ara.t.howard / noaa.gov <ara.t.howard / noaa.gov> wrote:
> > On Thu, 2 Feb 2006, Austin Ziegler wrote:
> > > I may be in the minority, but I believe that the GNU GPL is a very bad
> > > licence for libraries in a highly dynamic environment such as Ruby, at least
> > > if it is the only licence. (This is one reason I've never looked further at
> > > a number of libraries and have in at least one instance created a clean
> > > implementation of a ported library.)
> > i hate thinking about this stuff and have just released under ruby's licence
> > to avoid issues - see any problem with that?
>
> Not at all. My problem here is that WSS4R is under GNU GPL only, not
> dually licensed. It is the GNU GPL that is a problem, not the Ruby
> licence.

That's really highly subjective.  Outside of Ruby, I *always* use the GPL.

The license of Ruby only holds ground because the GPL is there.  The
terms and conditions that Matz wrote are highly permissive, but do
very little to protect an authors rights.  It would not make me feel
comfortable to use a piece of software under a non-GPL compliant
situtaiton, because I would not trust the legal protections of the
plain Ruby license without the GPL's backing.

Still, in interest of avoiding a flame war, myself being a strong
supporter of the Free Software Foundation and copyleft in general, I
use the License of Ruby for ruby applications, because this tends to
be a reasonable compromise that can potentially preserve copyleft
while also leaving the doors open for non-free applications or (in the
better case) free applications that link with non-free software.

So, to keep *most* people happy, the disguntive license works just fine.