Re: FriBidi's license (was - my Bidi...)

[Behdad Esfahbod <behdad at cs dot toronto dot edu>]

On Wed, 17 Mar 2004, Roozbeh Pournader wrote:

> On Wed, 2004-03-17 at 19:39, Nadim Shaikli wrote:
> > by using or even writing our own Bidi
>
> /me is very shocked to hear that!

/me is not shocked at all.

> Why in hell did we spend those many hours working on FriBidi's 100%
> Unicode compatiblity if one will still need to write a new bidi engine
> for many free software applications?

There are 10 kinds of application developers:

  * Those who start their own bidi implementation
  * Those who use FriBidi of ICU

> That's something to think about. I seriously believe we should change
> the license to a more liberal license, and the Putty case is proof
> enough. We should consider asking the opinion of GNU people of course,
> as I don't want to lose the GNU package status.

No, I seriously believe the opposite.  I like the Copyleft, GPL,
LGPL, and FSF.  And I want to walk in the road.  Why?  Because
that's the way many great pieces of software are walking in:
Linux, GNOME, blah, blah...

Another reason about using LGPL, many companies pay for
developing LGPLed code, but for something MITish, they usually
first use the MITed code with their own changes to make money,
after a year they contribute their code...  I hate this way.

> IIRC, we at least had one contributor who was against relicensing his
> work (can't remember whom). Is there anyone else?

Omer Zak I guess, and add me now!

BTW, in the case of PuTTY, there are a 10 things to consider:

  * The weakest point in bidi support in PuTTY is not the bidi
alg, but the semantics of the terminal.

  * PuTTY is a no-op in Linux IMO

> roozbeh

--behdad
  behdad.org