[ANNOUCEMENT] Kaffe: The future

[G. Sumner Hayes]

Tim Wilkinson <tim at transvirtual.com> wrote:
> Having our own company, and not being confined by other copyrights
> and schedules, helps a lot on our way towards this goal. But there is
> no free meal. During the past year, we also experienced considerable
> "exploitation" by others, not contributing anything, but trying to
> make money with our work. Now we, ourselves, have to think about
> how to make a living from that. The way we want to combine free and
> commercial software resembles a bit what turned out to work with
> Ghostscript.  And who would deny that this system is a valuable
> contribution to free software, even if it is not under the GPL?

It's certainly worthwile.  Do you have any idea when the copyright
license for the new kaffe/Biss will be available?  Since you mention
Ghostscript, do you have any intention of reverting old versions of
the product to a "free" (where free means something like the old kaffe
license or Artistic license or GPL or X Consortium license) license
after some period of time (a year or 18 months or so)?

I honestly don't want to sound like I'm attacking you, I'm just trying
to figure out what the licensing will look like.

> The main system (with sources for the VM, core libraries and the AWT)
> will be free for commercial and non-commercial purposes, but not
> for all platforms and not for somebody who tries to make money with
> modified versions of it.

Will shipping patched versions on CDs and other commercial media be
permitted?  Will it be permitted if the patches are freely contributed
back to Transvirtual?  Will other commercial use of modified versions
be permitted if the modifications are made freely available to
Transvirtual?  I'm concerned about the scenario in which Red Hat or
Debian or one of the other Linux or NetBSD distributors develops a
bugfix or enhancement; will they have to wait for Transvirtual to
incorporate that change into the official version before they can
distribute the improved version in their commercially distributed
versions?

Most importantly to me, will embedding of the new kaffe in freely
available systems (e.g. web browsers, IDEs) be permitted?

> There will be versions of the system without public sources and binaries.
> Since this is a commercial market anyway, or main commercial targets
> will be:
[SNIP]

Will free ports to these platforms be allowed if the free software
community puts in the effort to do them?  Will any sorts of free
development (source code and binaries made available at zero cost to
Transvirtual and whoever else wants them) be forbidden?  If so, can you
clarify which ones will be forbidden?

-Sumner

-- 
rage, rage against the dying of the light