On Aug 7, 2020, at 14:27, Steven Nunez steve_nunez@yahoo.com wrote:
Gents,
I nearly had ABCL into an upcoming project, until I checked the license. I should have looked at this before I embarked down this path, but for some reason assumed that since ABCL is a relatively young implementation it was using Apache/MIT/BSD or something similar.
I don’t think ABCL qualifies as “a relatively young implementation”, as the ABCL sources go back to the releases of the J editor as of 2002.
[1]: https://sourceforge.net/projects/armedbear-j/files/j/0.15.0/
[…]
However there's a few problem with this: • It has the words "GNU General Public License", which rings loud alarm bells with corporate lawyers (and is disqualified by clauses ii/iii anyway) • Whilst the intention is to allow ABCL to be mixed with proprietary code, the IP equivalent of ambulance chasing lawyers may still see it as an opportunity for profit. It's worth reading the BusyBox saga if you're not familiar with it. • It's never been tested in court The last point is worth elaborating on. I once cornered a friendly corporate lawyer at one of our company drinks functions and showed him the LLGPL and asked what he thought. His response put it all in perspective. He said:
"It looks fine to me, but it's never been tested in court. Would you take an open source project and deploy it to production and bet the company's livelihood on it, without testing it first?"
I guess I can't blame them really. Would you want stick your neck out for something with potentially catastrophic consequences, when there's plenty of alternatives? Lisp has enough of an uphill climb just on the technology front, this is the nail in the coffin.
[…]
ABCL is [licensed under the GPL v2 with the classpath exception][2], not the LLGPL.
[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPL_linking_exception
That the GPL has “never been tested in court” is certainly not true: it has been successfully defended multiple times, and has proved to be one of the stronger means of enforcing software freedom.
[3]: https://www.fsf.org/news/wallace-vs-fsf [4]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_General_Public_License#Legal_status
One is free to provide the resources to overcome the percieved problem of “[betting] the company’s livelihood on it, without testing it first”. I fail to see how changing the license for ABCL will somehow make it more tested, especially wrt. to the commercial liabilities that are specific to your desired usage.
[4]: https://abcl.org/commercial-support.shtml
Questions: • Would the current maintainers of ABCL consider relicensing it under a MIT, BSD or Apache license? • If so, do we have a list of all the contributors? • If so, how many are there and are they contactable?
When we released ABCL 1.0 way back in 2011, the current maintainers informally agreed to attempt to preserve the spirit of original copyright holder (Peter Graves) of having a core implementation which others were able to create software licensed under terms of their choosing. The current licensing scheme for ABCL continues to preserve such freedom.
Nevertheless, if you were willing to provide the necessary financial and legal resources, I would be ammendable to beginning such an effort that would somehow preserve the promised freedom that all previous contributors to ABCL have labored towards. But from your not checking the ABCL license before you even entertained the notion of using it under such legal conditions, your having induced Alessio to provide a substantial contributions towards your desired usage, and to your new request for further unpaid work to utilize ABCL for your commercial contract, I fear that you have a fundamental misunderstanding of what working with “free” software actually entails.
Sincerely, Mark