Re: Roll your own

Daniel Veillard (veillard@rufus.w3.org)
Thu, 22 Jan 1998 14:05:47 -0500


Hi Robert,

I didn't know that you were on FoRK !

> BTW, I just noticed another thing which the ZDNet story is less than
> completely clear on; it says that they will allow source to be
> downloaded, modified and redistributed, but says explicit nothing
> about reuse in commercial products. (I am not even remotely tempted
> to draw any conclusions from this, other than that the person who drew
> up the press release was probably *not* a connoisseur of license-style
> flamewars of the type presently raging in gnu.misc.discuss).

I guess that even at NS it's not completely clear either (see the first
mail in the thread):

:The company will handle free source distribution with a license
: which allows source code modification and
:redistribution and provides for free availability of
:source code versions, building on the heritage of the
: GNU Public License (GPL), familiar to
:developers on the Net.

I read that as "we will try to be as near as possible to the GPL"
however NS uses a lot of codes which is not GPLable like the Sun
Java implementation, and probably some of the original Mosaic code
covered by the NCSA Copyright ...

Daniel