This is the mail archive of the
kawa@sourceware.org
mailing list for the Kawa project.
Re: Kawa (re-)licensing
I have entered into an agreement to re-license Kawa under the MIT
license. (A moderate amount of money did change hands.)
I did consider alternative licenses, including the LGPL. A problem
with the LGPL is that it's more complicated, and uses terminology
(such as 'linking') that is unclear in the Kawa/Java/Scheme context.
An advantage of a license like the LGPL (or the old Kawa license)
is that encourages companies to return changes they've made.
However, sensible people quickly realize that keeping private forks
is major pain, and so will contribute back their changes.
Non-sensible people don't read licenses carefully anyway ...
I haven't changed anything in the Kawa CVS tree yet. Right now
I'm concentrating on a proposal for JavaOne. (I've been doing
something quite cool. Think a high-level Scheme wrapper on top
of the Echo2 (http://www.nextapp.com/platform/echo2/echo/)
AJAX/Servlet library. More soon.)
After the JavaOne submission I'll fix up the copyright notices
and documentation. I may try to do a 1.8.1 release. There's
actually some nice new features and fixes in CVS that would
justify a 1.8.1 release even without the license change.
--
--Per Bothner
per@bothner.com http://per.bothner.com/