[antlr-interest] Price of Antlr Studio

Anthony Youngman Anthony.Youngman at eca-international.com
Thu Sep 22 07:10:21 PDT 2005


Christopher,

There's a big difference between Red Hat Linux (where RH's fraction of
ownership is minimal), and Antlr where Ter owns maybe half. And again,
moving on to TT and MySQL where they own (or control) 100%.

Note also, that with Red Hat, TT and MySQL, if you're not the copyright
owner you're making money on applications or services, not on the
product itself. Ter want wants people to be able to make money from
Antlr itself.

I didn't say "GNU *prohibits* commercial development". I said "BSD
*allows* commercial development". And you have to admit, GNU makes
earning money *from* *the* *product* *itself* pretty much commercially
impossible. That's just the way things pan out in practice. And from
what I can tell, that's not what Ter wants. As I said, my project will
be (L)GPL, because I don't want people profiting from the *product*
*itself*.

Cheers,
Wol

-----Original Message-----
From: Christopher Schultz [mailto:christopher.d.schultz at comcast.net] 
Sent: 22 September 2005 14:55
To: Anthony Youngman
Cc: Prashant Deva; ANTLR Interest
Subject: Re: [antlr-interest] Price of Antlr Studio

Anthony,

> Ter has consistently said he wants Antlr to be widely used, and has
> deliberately chosen the BSD licence so that it can be used in
commercial
> products ...

The GPL has no prohibitions about use in commercial software. You can
sell your software all you like. But, you also have to give it away.
That may not make a whole lot of sense to you, but it sure does to a
company like Red Hat.

If you are talking about "GPL" as the specific GPL license (and not the
LGPL), then you're right: it's "viral". However, if you mean GPL as a
term to mean "A Gnu-Style Licence", then you're wrong: the LGPL isn't
viral. You can feel free to sell software that uses LGPL'd components,
and you don't have to give away your source or binaries.

Here's my two cents on the license of ANTLR: I would have preferred that
Terrence require mods to be given back to the community. He (and others)
have spend a ton of time and energy building this product that is both
libre and gratis and I think that the entire community would benefit
from 3rd-party additions. If Terrence won't put them into the core ANTLR
distro, they can be offered as add-ons or they can even fork the code.

I just hate it when people make blanket statements like Gnu licenses
prohibit commercial development. :(

Anyway, I'm off my soapbox.

-chris

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