[erlang-questions] Developing killer / open source apps

[Max Lapshin]

On Thu, Aug 4, 2011 at 12:44 AM, Steve Strong <steve@REDACTED> wrote:
> What's the chances of erlyvideo and the related libraries also being
> licensed with something slightly more permissive than GPL, such as LGPL or
> similar; we deal with a number of corporate clients where use of GPL is
> pretty much forbidden, so are having to replicate a number of areas of
> erylvideo functionality.  If the licensing was different, we could instead
> spend such efforts contributing back to erlyvideo…
> Cheers,
> Steve


I'm open to communications on this point.

While erlyvideo was licensed as MIT I have received only 10 lines of
code from external contributors. Only 10 lines during 3 years.

Now, when erlyvideo is GPL it is easier for me to get money and
erlyvideo becomes better and better. Sorry, but I don't believe in
opensource
contributors to streaming servers. I'm watching at situation in other
streaming servers (rtmpd and red5) and see, that there is the same
situation:
no contributors, but many users.

So, currently I have zero reasons to switch licenses, because for 3
years there were absolutely no qualified contributors willing to send
their code,
but there were  guys, that wished to sell packed erlyvideo without
sharing me any profit.

Yet, there are commercial clients, that don't want to distribute their
source code and I find ways to work with them and I share my code
under non-GPL.
Everybody is in win from this: we get profit, community gets better
opensourced code.

While there are no substitutions for libraries, that I've written for
erlyvideo, I don't see any reasons to change anything.
BSD is good for infrastructure code. For example, libreadline gets
problems from GPL license because we have to use horrible libedit.

Erlyvideo libraries aren't distributable outside erlyvideo, so there
is even no reason to make them LGPL.