Underlining each victory was the fact that Stallman had
done little to fight for them. In the case of Troll
Tech, Stallman had simply played the role of free
software pontiff. In 1999, the company had come up with
a license that met the conditions laid out by the Free
Software Foundation, but in examining the license
further, Stallman detected legal incompatibles that
would make it impossible to bundle Qt with
GPL-protected software programs. Tired of battling
Stallman, Troll Tech management finally decided to
split the Qt into two versions, one GPL-protected and
one QPL-protected, giving developers a way around the
compatibility issues cited by Stallman.
In the case of Sun, they desired to play according to
the Free Software Foundation's conditions. At the 1999
O'Reilly Open Source Conference, Sun Microsystems
cofounder and chief scientist Bill Joy defended his
company's "community source" license, essentially a
watered-down compromise letting users copy and modify
Sun-owned software but not charge a fee for said
software without negotiating a royalty agreement with
Sun.
Pages:
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354