So the whole thing had no point other than making life hard for organisations with actual principles, like Debian. And he wonders why people get pissed off.
> If Debian's principles are free software then obviously their values are incompatible with this license due to the restrictions it imposes.
Restrictions which he clearly has no willingness to actually enforce. So they only serve to make life hard for the decent folks.
> It's not a hard choice for Debian to make - they just put it in non-free with thousands of other packages.
Sure, but that then has other consequences - they can't use it as a dependency in their build system, they have to move downstream stuff into contrib or look for replacement dependencies, ....
actually, the way i see it, the fact that people took the effort to contact the developer shows that they really wanted to use that. otherwise they would have just used it silently and the developer might not even find out about it. in some cases that might even have been an opportunity to earn some money.
I mean if he didn't charge IBM (and for such a broad license) he's surely not charging anyone else. I guess he opens a line of communication with them in some sense, but it's with some random staffer in the legal department rather than anyone who's going to be hiring contractors, and surely there would be friendlier ways if that was the goal (hell, just asking people to say hi would be starting you off on better terms).
FWIW, I always recommend charging 3 months of jr dev time for cross-licensing and use the cash to pay for a project-related internship. It's win-win-win:
- you get help with your project,
- the project (and its corporate user) gets new features or bug fixes or refactors,
- the student gets a learning experience.
Mentoring does take a surprising amount of time, so you can also tack on a little extra and treat yourself to a weekend at a ski report (or whatever your thing is) as a "thank you" to yourself for the free mentorship :)
I only just got here but I believe the point is that IBM and their customers (and minions, of course; strangely, not their patsies but maybe they fall under minions) are privileged to use this software for Evil.
