[ODE] TriMesh support and OPCODE added to ODE core

[Anselm Hook]

Noting Pierre's passing remark or comment about not wanting to let other
people make a lot of money from opcode...:

I definately appreciate having access to opcode - it is a great asset
since dynamics is effectively useless without collision :-).  Writing such
a component is quite hard and a significant barrier to use if it were not
there.

I'll just throw my thoughts out there in any case:

My suggestion would be to just leave it under a BSD license because that
actually may accomplish many of the goals that Pierre likely has.

Pierre may like to see improvements, may like to be recognized for the
work, might enjoy actually get financially rewarded for working in this
area - but at the same time fulfil an open source ethos of benefiting his
community of peers...  this is guesswork but typically these are the kinds
of things most people want.

But at the same time Pierre may be moderately concerned about people just
taking and not returning.  There is a kind of mental image being presented
of a kind of thief or master who takes the labor of others and profits
from it.  This seems like the kind of image that Richard Stallman would
draw; where corporations steal work and profit from it without giving back
to the creators.

True that is not a very nice image, but that doesn't actually seem to
be what actually happens with BSD licensed software in practice.

The kinds of benefits that I see BSD having are:

1) At the very least when something is truly free then it has a much
higher chance of actually being used and improved.

Developers who are able to 'put dinner on their table' by using free
source code are more likely to be serious about using that technology
well; reporting defects, and generally being more committed.  It becomes
more a question of livelihood rather than simply hobby.

2) It is not the number of eyeballs looking at a piece of code that is
important as much as the 'quality' of those eyeballs.  If people feel that
they also own a piece of code then they can get more serious about it in a
sense - whereas with GPL the ownership is actually to the FSF typically -
and they have leverage over use rather than oneself.

3) There is perhaps a misnomer that software is an asset at all.  A
commercial venture using an open source technology would probably want to
minimize their liabilities in terms of code ownership and maintenance by
pushing their changes back out to the community.  Otherwise they'd be
faced with a continued and difficult re-integration process each time the
open source version changed with respect to their internal secret version.

A BSD licensed program therefore gets use commercially and also gets
commercial grade feedback...  rather than just being amateur hour at the
local pub.

4) Most commercial users also will likely be trying to build intellectual
property around things that are truly unique; not simply improvements to
one of the foundation technologies they are using.  A good open source
technology raises the bar for all companies - and it becomes pretty hard
to compete on fundamental technology improvements when all of your
competitors are almost at that level already because they are all
leveraging off of the same code.  In a sense open source in general
decimates competition in terms of code and forces people to compete more
in terms of genuinely novel ideas (that are more legitimately their right
to retain ownership over).

5) The evidence seems to suggest that BSD licensed work does better in the
public domain.

OpenBSD and OpenSSH are good examples of what tends to really happen with
BSD licensed software; if they are reasonable contenders then they tend to
completely overrun every other competitor in their space and tend to
create benefit for a lot of people - simply making the 'pie' much bigger.

ODE itself seems to have tended to create a fairly even benefit and
increase in community wealth; rather than any few people walking away with
a prize.  Certainly it has allowed a community to tackle 'kinds of'
problems that they could not tackle before.

In conclusion,

Open source licenses in general are a good idea - especially for smaller
groups who can't muster enough of a legal army to put walls around their
technology. If something has a free license then one may not own it
oneself but at least others cannot take it away either.  I do see BSD
being a 'more free' license than GPL and thus having 'more of' the good
properties that free software shows off.

It is true that with a BSD license people do not have an 'obligation' to
add their improvements back into the original source tree - but often they
will - for a variety of subtle reasons.  The reality of the actual use of
the BSD license versus the GPL license seems to substantially differ from
the rhetoric that surrounds each.

 - a

On Tue, 1 Jul 2003, Martin C. Martin wrote:

>
>
> "Adam D. Moss" wrote:
> >
> > Pierre has said that
> > OPCODE is okay under the ODE license now, right?  So the
> > ODE+OPCODE combo can be used in all the ways that ODE-alone can?
>
> Well, he also said that you can't make a lot of money from Opcode, which
> goes against both the GPL and BSD-style licenses, as far as I can tell.
> It would be better of Pierre would simply choose an existing license, or
> just put it in the public domain...
>
> - Martin
> _______________________________________________
> ODE mailing list
> ODE@q12.org
> http://q12.org/mailman/listinfo/ode
>