Well ... here's the rub in the aD license:
Under ADPL, you may choose to distribute the source code for packages you develop that use services provided by ACS Core under any license agreement you choose, open or closed. We invite you to distribute such products through ArsDigita. (Under GPL, you would have been obligated to distribute the source code for your product under GPL if it included any modifications to ACS.)
(emphasis mine)
As I mentioned earlier, much like the original NPL/MPL, this allows someone to take the ACS and bundle it into a closed-source, proprietary product.
Since I'm not interested in seeing OpenACS releases get bundled into closed-source, proprietary products released and sold by others I don't want my code licensed under these terms. This is a primary reason to avoid any possible "pollution" of the OpenACS project with code from aD under their license.
Certainly our approach is cautious, probably even overly-cautious. But at this point we really have no compelling reason to not be cautious, so we might as well be cautious...
Anyway, I think Al probably gets the point now. If dotLRN (for instance) were released under the NPL/MPL/aDPL any commercial entity could bundle it into a proprietary, closed-source product...
