[erlang-questions] Developing killer / open source apps

[Steve Strong]

Given your previous experience when licensed as MIT, I can fully understand your position - 10 lines in 3 years is a pretty poor return :(  A real shame (from my perspective), but entirely understandable.

Cheers,

Steve

On 3 Aug 2011, at 23:08, Max Lapshin wrote:

> 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.