Hi monks,

some time ago, I decided to look into "Everything", the core engine - written in perl - of Perlmonks, to maybe submit a patch, or to be able to start some group monk effort to help vroom help us help ourselves. Featurewise. Bugwise. Or something.

Well, I was a bit baffled when I read the License, found here - and decided, no, I don't want to contribute to code "protected" in such a disgusting (IMHO - YMMV) way. (Nontransfereable - come on!) I was expecting something like the Artistic License - guess why. But Ok.

Perlmonks is a nice place, and kept getting nicer. So my attitude towards it was a bit ambivalent, but I thought maybe I was just too picky about that license thing, and after all I'm not that good a coder and haven't that much time to spend, so maybe letting vroom do all the working for us might even be ok with me.

Recently Abigail - a perl ubercoder - joined Perlmonks, and soon after joining, left.

I can't keep myself from asking me: Had the code to perlmonks been free, would Abigail simply have implemented the features she wanted, and just sent the patches in? Would she still be with us? Maybe not. Maybe it was a community thing...

But this question keeps ringing, and the Free Software Issue may haunt perlmonks in some way or another at some time.

I'm just posting this now to be able to say "see, I toldya" when it's too late. (Haha - only serious)

antihec 

-- 
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In reply to Free Open Source Everything? by antihec

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