Date: Mon, 22 Feb 1999 08:25:25 +1100 From: Andy Newman <atrn@zeta.org.au> To: chat@freebsd.org Subject: Re: More important Windows Refund Day coverage... Message-ID: <19990222082525.A1429@ska.bsn> In-Reply-To: <199902211924.OAA02025@y.dyson.net>; from John S. Dyson on Sun, Feb 21, 1999 at 02:24:09PM -0500 References: <19990221180845.J93492@lemis.com> <199902211924.OAA02025@y.dyson.net>
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> Greg Lehey said: > > > > To be fair to rms, if GNU is communist (and there's a lot going for > > that theory; I've proposed it myself. Funnily, rms wasn't amused), > > then FreeBSD is anarchist. That didn't work in society either. > > > I don't *quite* agree with the characterization that FreeBSD is > anarchist. Actually, from a development standpoint (which is > where GPL and BSD MOSTLY differ), the BSD approach optionally > allows for ownership of ones own investment into derived > works. I think both are capitalist, or at least both methods rely upon the idea of ownership of something (I just posted about this so I'm all revved up about it....excuse me :). Both the BSD license and GPL allow owners of something to control how it may be used. Both allow individual to own things and even to profit and make private capital from them. There's no similarity to (the theoretically perfect) communism where the state owns everything and people worked for the public good etc... The two licenses are just methods of distributing something you own. Both enforce various restrictions on the user (with the GPL being rather more restrictive and over- stepping the boundaries by restricting the licensing available to users of GPL'd things to essentially the GPL). > GPL seems to ignore the value in the sense of > capital. That GPL helps the merchandising from the standpoint > that the derived code *has* to be exposed under certain > terms, at the expense of the people with mostly development > skills. Well it (GPL) forces the public exposure and lack of ownership of intellectual property. It limits the capital available to a person. It doesn't say you can't own expressions of intellectual property. But does restrict how others can use your expressions and forces the same restrictions on them (only a little thing ! :). So trade secrets go to hell with the GPL. As do patents. Leaving you only with copyright to protect the ownership of your work and that only counts for the expression of an idea and not the idea itself which blows a big chunk out of the available means to generate capital in our changing economy. In summary: I guess you're right. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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