Re: [Libjit-developers] Re: Libjit-developers Digest, Vol 15, Issue 2

[Aleksey Demakov]

2007/2/11, Kirill Kononenko <address@hidden>:
> It is not acceptable to change the libJIT license, which is chosen by
> Southern Storm, under a different license than the GPL, because those
> who have already contributed to libJIT assigned their code to Southern
> Storm under the condition that libJIT is released under the GPL. On
> the other hand, i think, those who contribute and do give back to the
> project, but not proprietary open source adventurers and free manpower
> seekers, should be allowed to get a version of libJIT under the GPL +
> LE. Such version could be released from time to time. I suggest to
> release just one special version of libJIT under the GPL + LE.

Here is the list of people who contributed to libjit:

Rhys Weatherley
Miroslaw Dobrzanski-Neumann
Thong Nguyen
Evin Robertson
Norbert Bollow
Peter Lund
Klaus Treichel
Thomas Cort
Kirill Kononenko
Aleksey Demakov
Radek Polak
Avinash Atreya
Yan Burman
Heiko Weiss

Some of these people have agreed with relicensing. I think that
if everyone who did a significant contribution agrees with this it
might become acceptable.

I guess the reason for libjit relicense is indeed an attempt to
expand its audience by allowing its use by proprietary software.

Currently, libjit is used only by pnet. I do not see any rush among
other free software projects to make use of it. And the number of
projects that might make use of it is not that big anyway. Libjit
has very different nature than, let say, readline. Its target
audience is very narrow in the first place.

Also, should the relicense happen, I do not think that Microsoft or
Novell will jump into using libjit. So this is not going to hurt pnet.

Keeping libjit GPL in the hope that sonner or later some sort of
a free software project emerges that will have an edge over its
proprietary competition thanks to libjit is something that is a way
too speculative for me to consider seriously.

On the other hand, any additional libjit user will make it stronger,
At the very least this will provide more testing thus ensuring
its reliability.

Regards,
Aleksey