[plt-scheme] input requested from people who care about licenses of scheme libraries

On Sun, Apr 13, 2008 at 10:18 AM, Neil Van Dyke <neil at neilvandyke.org> wrote:
...
>  I'm thinking of distributing most of my *new* Scheme libraries of under the
> more restrictive GPL 3 or AGPL 3 licenses.  (I plan to keep new versions of
> existing libraries under their existing licenses.)
...
>  My original motivation for picking LGPL 2.1 over GPL 2.1 is that I thought
> LGPL was the best way to promote use of Scheme in my own small way.  With
> Scheme now having good name-recognition among software techies, Scheme has
> less need of help.

If Scheme is to increase it's share of developers it needs a thriving
commercial market based around it, or it will continue to be
restricted to after hours / hobbyist programming.  This market is only
just beginning to develop.  If you want to help companies like Untyped
develop this market then your software must be compatible with closed
source code.   Despite releasing a large number of open source
libraries we continue to develop significant amounts of closed source
code -- because our customers don't give a damn about the open source
movement and want to control the code they pay us to develop.  We are
very careful to tell our customers that they don't own all the code we
develop, and for some this has been a very difficult concept to sell.
I can't think of a single significant company, outside of Mozilla and
perhaps some Linux vendors, that doesn't have a significant code base
that is closed.  Yet many of these companies are driving the
development of open source libraries and tools.

N.