[lug] Initial impressions of Kubuntu

[Daniel Webb]

On Wed, Nov 15, 2006 at 01:01:05PM -0700, Nate Duehr wrote:

> Still major problems with that one, people looking into it.  Trademarks on
> the logos, and the name "Java"... no one's quite sure if Sun will allow
> modified binary redistribution... etc.  Sun could be being good, or Sun
> could be being clueless or mildly evil, depending on the details.  Time and
> research of the actual licenses will tell.  Just like Firefox/Thunderbird.
> :-)

I tend to base my opinion of these things partly on a group's track record.
For example, you always know the FSF's motivation for doing something, and you
always know Microsoft's motivation based on years of evidence.  That does make
me a bit skeptical of Sun, but I think this is the real deal.  We may have to
change the name for trademark reasons, that wouldn't be the end of the world.

I've been surprised there hasn't been more dual GPL/commercial software coming
out in the last 5 years, I thought it will be fairly common by now.  It is
really a nice way to do it: people who wouldn't have paid for your software
anyhow will use it and increase its popularity, but people who are making
money off it have to get a commercial license and pay you.  It wouldn't work
for something like a word processor, but anything where customization is key
(like embedded Java) would be ideal.  If you're a company that controls all
your code, it's a model that only really works well with the GPL; most of the
other free software licenses don't fit with this model for one reason or
another.  If you don't have control over the code, I guess a BSD/commercial
model like Apache is better.