[PD] expr alternative

Jonathan Wilkes jancsika at yahoo.com
Wed Oct 26 08:04:29 CEST 2011


----- Original Message -----

> From: Marvin Humphrey <marvin at rectangular.com>
> To: Simon Wise <simonzwise at gmail.com>
> Cc: pd-list at iem.at
> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2011 1:20 AM
> Subject: Re: [PD] expr alternative
> 
> On Wed, Oct 26, 2011 at 08:51:23AM +0800, Simon Wise wrote:
>>  On 26/10/11 01:29, Hans-Christoph Steiner wrote:
>> 
>>>  The Apple App Store is incompatible with the GPL and LGPL, from what I
>>>  understand. Getting Apple to make their App Store compatible with the 
> GPL and
>>>  LGPL is another much better solution since it will work for all GPL and 
> LGPL
>>>  software.
>> 
>>  this is of course the best solution ... 
> 
> ---->8 snip license advocacy and geopolitical theory 8<----
> 
> I would like to register my disagreement.  In my opinion, the solution which
> best serves the broad community of users -- including those users for whom
> expr's licensing is problematic -- is for Pd Vanilla to have uniform BSD
> licensing.  It seems to me that an implementation of expr which is
> license-compatible with the rest of Vanilla is a perfectly reasonable and
> understandable feature request.
> 
> The practical rationale is obvious: if GPL (or potentially LGPL) is not an
> option for you, then expr is missing from your toolkit, and it would be nice
> to have it.  I understand that there are several valuable contributors within
> the Pd community who believe that it is important to deny that feature request
> for moral reasons.  There are also opposing moral reasons to grant it, but as
> before, I intend to keep my developer list posts on licensing limited to
> dry mechanics if possible; if you absolutely cannot live without a sprinkle of
> BSD license advocacy to complement the on-list deluge of copyleft license
> advocacy, please ask off-list.

As it is, I don't think the expr family objects are suitable for inclusion as internal 
objects because of what I mentioned about clashing with standard implied Pd 
floats (as well as the automatic stripping of unnecessary decimal points and 
zeroes).  So even if one got the license changed, one would still have to figure 
out a way to make expr more "Pd-ish" without breaking backwards compatibility. 
(I'm not sure that's even possible.)

But here's a novel idea-- how about the guy who wants a 3-clause BSD-licensed 
expr for the expressed _sole_ purpose of using the object in proprietary 
software actually _pay_ money to a developer to code a similar BSD-licensed 
object?

-Jonathan

> 
> Best,
> 
> Marvin Humphrey
> 
> 
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