Date: Sun, 02 May 1999 18:00:56 -0400 (EDT) From: John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in> Cc: Kris Kennaway <kkennawa@physics.adelaide.edu.au>, advocacy@FreeBSD.ORG, Jeroen Ruigrok/Asmodai <asmodai@wxs.nl>, Laurence Berland <stuyman@confusion.net> Subject: Re: Some thoughts on advocacy (was: Slashdot ftp.cdrom.com upgra Message-ID: <XFMail.990502180056.jobaldwi@vt.edu> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.10.9905030221220.7672-100000@theory1.physics.iisc.ernet.in>
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Since you keep going on about this... Well.. hmm.. seems the archives are a bit behind, so I'll just repost the message I sent earlier instead of giving you a URL to find it at: -------------------------------8<----------------------------------- On 16-Apr-99 unknown@riverstyx.net wrote: > But in regards to the GPL, it seems like a fairly innocuous kinda thing. > I write some software, declare it to be GPL'd, and thus guaranteeing that > the source code shall remain available. It doesn't really limit me all > that much. And if I write a new version, I can opt to not release it > under the GPL, freeing me from its burdens should I decide that I want to > go commercial with it. Actually, (someone correct me if I'm wrong), but if you release version 1.0 under GPL, and use any of the 1.0 code in version 2.0 that you try to sell w/o the source, then anyone can sue you for the source code to version 2.0 because it would be a derivative of 1.0 and by the GPL that means the source to 2.0 would have to be GPL'd and thus freely available, which prevents you from selling it, for all intents and purposes. It gets much worse when you have a large propietary product, such as your own OS specific to your application, and you want to add drivers for a newer network card. You wouldn't be able to use GPL'd code because you would screw yourself. You'd have to release the source code to your propietary OS, which your competitors would gladly take from you and sink you. OTOH, such a company can safely use BSL'd code without worrying about having to release the source to their competitors. And let's face it, not all software is going to be free, we do have to eat somehow. So we can't kill all possibility of selling software. -------------------------------8<----------------------------------- On 02-May-99 Rahul Siddharthan wrote: > I just saw an article on licenses in Daemon News > http://www.daemonnews.org/199905/gpl.html > (which was incidentally linked on linuxtoday so a lot of linux > users will read it.) The writer is of course critical but sounds > like he's trying hard to say a few nice things. However, my > favourite quote is this. > > "But the fact that the GPL can infect code derived from other > GPL'ed programs, as well as the fact that the output of some > GPL'ed programs must also be GPL'ed, is unacceptable. In fact, it > should be contested over its shaky sense of legality in these > matters. I'm not aware of any court cases involving the GPL so > far, so we have yet to see what will happen when such an issue > arises. I can only hope that the courts will decide against the > GPL's habit of infecting other code." > > This is old hat, as is the claim that the GPL "does not respect > intellectual property". Let me make a case that it does respect > intellectual property. Yours but not somebody elses who only wants to use 1 small part of your code in their program. Instead, they are forced to reinvent the wheel to prevent their program from being GPL'd. > Remember that when the GPL was created, and almost equally today, > the norm is not to allow re-use of source code at all. So a > licence like the GPL which allows you to re-use source code under > certain conditions, was and still is extraordinarily permissive. > To me the extremists (socialists, communists, your choice of > epithet normally thrown at RMS) seem to be not the FSF but the > BSD crowd, who apparently think you should be free to do > absolutely *anything* with someone else's source code except > claim it as your own or sue the author... Note in the hypothetical situation in my first paragraph (which actually isn't hypothetical, but anyways) the GPL actually *prevents* code re-use. --- John Baldwin <jobaldwi@vt.edu> -- http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/ PGP Key: http://members.freedomnet.com/~jbaldwin/pgpkey.asc "Power Users Use the Power to Serve!" - http://www.freebsd.org To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-advocacy" in the body of the message
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