On Thu, Aug 16, 2001 at 12:27:56AM -0500, William Kitchen wrote:
> > BTW. Is the CUMP project still alive?
>
> I can't speak for others who were involved in it, but my personal
> reasons for losing interest in the project came from an inability
> of the group to reach a consensus on two key issues.
>
> The first issue, and most important to me, is that there was no
> agreement about how the design should be licensed.  A variety of
> views were discussed, but there seemed to be no progress towards
> resolving these differences.  Continuing to contribute ideas
> without a clearly defined and documented license was just not
> acceptable to me.  And I absolutely wasn't going to contribute
> substantial man-hours without a license to protect the resulting
> designs.
>

What do you mean by "license to protect the resulting designs"?
If it is going to be the "community programmer", than the license should
provide every community member with right to use the design for anything
(even to use it in commercial production environment).
If it has another, more restrictive license it will fail, because
there are too many good commercial programmers available on the market.
However it can find its place, just like Linux (or FreeBSD, or other
GPL'ed software) found its place.
The main advantage of such programmer could be that anybody can contribute
to the design, and can be sure that the resulting project will be always open
and available for him and for the others.
The more restrictive the license is - the higher probability that no one
will be interested in using and contributing to the project.

That's the reason why I stopped to use the M$ or Borland's compilers for
DOS/Windows programming and switched to the GCC/DJGPP, that's why I use SciLab
instead of Matlab. Using any such system, finding bugs and patches or
workarounds or extensions I contribute to that compiler or other system.
So I prefere to spend my time for contributing to something which will
remain freely available for me (and for the others as well)...

Well its just my, highly biased point of view...

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                                Regards,
                              Wojciech M. Zabolotny
        http://www.ise.pw.edu.pl/~wzab  <--> wzab@ise.pw.edu.pl

http://www.debian.org  Use Linux - an OS without "trojan horses" inside

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