Obviously I can't speak for him, but in some way it presumably is, since
that _is_ what he initially chose to do; that's why I was curious why he
changed his mind.
I must admit I was a bit disappointed by the response to luaprompt. I'm not sure I can go as far as call it bullying, at least I wouldn't like to see it that way, I just got the impression, that people were politely trying to tell me that I wasn't "playing nice" by releasing my software as GPL, the reason being that they can't use it in their proprietary commercial software.
I found that rather puzzling. I'm a professional programmer myself and as such I'm forced to write propriatary code for my employer in exchange for salary. I don't like it, that my work which could potentially benefit more people now only benefits my employer's bank account but such is the way of the world and I need to make a living. What I didn't understand initially was why it was somehow self-evident that I should release the code I write in my spare time, a practice that takes up much of it, and for which I do not ask to get payed but share publicly for whatever use it may be to others (programmers and end-users alike), why I should release this code in such a way that others can make money off it. I do not mean to say that making money off your work is bad but the whole concept seemed rather unreasonable to me.
I suppose the answer lies in the fact that open source is ultimately not about the benefit of end-users but about the benefit of developers. I release part the part of my codebase which I feel I can afford to and I receive testing, bugfixing and general feedback from others who receive free code in return. A sort of mutually beneficial exchange in the community of programmers. That's nice but the community at large, the end user is left out of it (unless of course the market is supposed to cater for their benefit). Still under this point of view I can see why it might seem unreasonable that someone would release code under the GPL.
Anyway I didn't want to go into all of this as it's only bound to frustrate or perhaps offend people and start a flamewar but since you brought the subject up I might as well state my point of view. Regarding the initial question, why I chose to relicense luaprompt, I can tell you that it wasn't due to submitting to bullying. It wasn't about luaprompt at all. I was planning on shortly releasing another two modules. One allows exposing C arrays (of any dimensionality and type) as Lua tables and the other builds a set of simple linear algebra and geometric transformation functions on top of it. These modules, at least the C-array-as-table module is of limited use on its own and needs other modules written on top of it to have any value and I intend to write a few but it would ultimately be of more value to all if it can be adopted by the community so that others may contribute functionality as well (if, of coure, it proves to be useful at all). My release of luaprompt has given me the impression that liberal licensing is a prerequisite to that. And since I got into the process of figuring out how exactly to do that within my larger GPL'd project (which is definitely going to stay that way) I though I might as well simplify things by releasing all my lua modules under the MIT. In the end they're not that large, being about 1000 to 1500 lines of C code each I would probably just force whomever found them useful to reimplement them and there's no point in that either.
Dimitris
