Skip site navigation (1)Skip section navigation (2)
Date:      Tue, 02 Sep 2003 21:25:16 -0600
From:      Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org>
To:        Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@online.fr>
Cc:        chat@freebsd.org
Subject:   Re: Ugly Huge BSD Monster
Message-ID:  <4.3.2.7.2.20030902211245.033c65d0@localhost>
In-Reply-To: <20030903004839.GA1625@online.fr>

next in thread | previous in thread | raw e-mail | index | archive | help
At 06:48 PM 9/2/2003, Rahul Siddharthan wrote:

>Actually, it's an excellent model.  If you want to use Qt in your own
>proprietary non-GPL code, you need to buy a licence from them (and lots
>of people are doing that)

No, lots of people are NOT doing that.

They're finding ways to use the GPLed version and keeping their money.

Stallman, Perens & Co. fraudulently claim that it's possible to make a 
decent income by dual licensing. But they know that it isn't so, and are
hoping that they can sucker gullible companies into adopting that business 
model. After which, they're bound to fail.

You see, if you give ANY code to end users for free, the market value
of its functionality tautologically becomes zero. (It has to, since
an informed buyer won't pay anything for something that s/he can get
for free.) Any customer who pays to license something which adds zero
market value to his or her product is in the hole from the start. So,
while a few foolish ones might do it, they'll quickly go out of business
and stop paying license fees. And the smarter ones will simply use the
no-cost version, on any terms that are necessary.

>The "competing with your own freeware" argument applies much more
>forcefully to the BSD licence.

No, it does not, because (a) there's no fraud and (b) it's possible to
make money from making incremental improvements. This is not possible
under the GPL, because GPLed code forces anyone who makes an incremental
improvement on the original to forfeit all rewards for his or her work.
The BSD license does not.

This doesn't mean that it's necessarily a good idea to give away your
uniquely valuable code under the BSD license, either. But the notion that 
the GPL somehow "protects" you if you do this is bogus and fraudulent. Again, 
this fraud is perpetrated by anti-business zealots, such as Bruce Perens, 
who hope to kill commercial software businesses and have done so quite
successfully this way.

>There are good arguments for the BSD licence but they have nothing to do
>with commercial benefit. 

Actually, there are commercial benefits to licensing under the BSD license.
Among other things, you can set a standard (witness the Berkeley TCP/IP
stack) and can foster development of software that works with a commercial
product (e.g. giving away skeleton drivers so that vendors can write
device drivers for your commercial operating system).

>Some valid arguments are that it helps promote
>open standards (a partially-broken Kerberos from Microsoft is better
>than a totally rewritten incompatible version) and that, if you start
>out without commercial goals but later change your mind, you can more
>easily re-use your own code without worrying about others' copyrights.

All true. But more importantly, the BSD license is ethical because it
is not an attempt to destroy others' livelihoods.

--Brett Glass



Want to link to this message? Use this URL: <https://mail-archive.FreeBSD.org/cgi/mid.cgi?4.3.2.7.2.20030902211245.033c65d0>