[fpc-devel] LGPL vs BSD

[Marco van de Voort]

> Op Fri, 4 Aug 2006, schreef Marco van de Voort:
> 
> > > Or, in case of fpc - build those specific applications with it, which
> > > are not common enough for a community to write.
> > 
> > I prefer I could tell some vendor "implement this embedded architecture", and if you
> > submit this back then I grant you a commercial license to integrate the
> > compiler into your IDE, without open sourcing the IDE, and for that purpose
> > alone. (more or less the GNU mechanism)
> 
> You can do this. Of course, you need agreement within the FPC team, but 
> there is no reason why we would need a GNU like copyright assignment 
> procedure for that.

We had this discussion before. I'll provide a summary for the rest:
- Since you don't have a systematic policy to point at, it is pretty hard to make 
   a case that you (the ones that say YES) really are all principal
   contributors. 
- Non-principal contributors are a problem. What is a contribution, what a
trivial fix? And again, how is your registration of this?
- Now, if GNU foundation says yes, they can go ahead. I don't know the size of
  the GNU board, but the decision making process could only involve a few
  people. The compiler at least has 15-20 contributors, the RTL/FCL and probably 
  vastly more.