From: Lucas Gonze (lucas@worldos.com)
Date: Sun Aug 27 2000 - 15:09:26 PDT
>The GPL is a way to right this imbalance. It ensures that proprietary
>software must compete with free software on its own terms:
>proprietary-software companies can't simply take a free ride on
>free-software features.
This is exactly why I use GPL instead of BSD/Apache licenses for all the
free software I write. It's hard enough to make a business case for giving
away source. GPL at least extends that discomfort to other businesses that
modify your source, because they also have to release their source.
That's not to say that the base64 library Dave is talking about isn't open
source - I think it is. GPL gives greater protections to the original
authors, but if the authors don't want those protections it doesn't make the
software less open.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Sun Aug 27 2000 - 12:19:55 PDT