Gordon Messmer wrote:
I quit reading that the first time after the second paragraph.
"Perceptive" is not what I thought of the author. The entire article
is a pompous straw-man argument. Find one place in that article
where the author cites any person who actually evinces the attitudes
that he attributes to the group he describes.
That's the point - the people who argue the point don't understand it
this way.
The author was clearly presenting his own views of GPL developers, and
nothing else.
And equally, developers who prefer not to apply the GPL restrictions,
either explicitly for the benefit of everyone or simply not caring how
their code is reused because they know it can't affect the availability
of their own work.
Close your eyes for a moment and picture a big red tag that reads:
$ COOPERATION
That's the GPL.
You seem to be implying that the GPL is necessary for cooperation. That
is just not true. The GPL is simply a restriction on the ways that
people can cooperate.
The price isn't the point at all, it is the restriction on reuse and
improvement in a large number of ways. And the real cost to society
is the lack of the things the restrictions prevent - at no gain to
anyone.
The "restriction on reuse" IS the price. In return for the privilege of
building your products on the work that has been done by the community
of GPL developers, you must also license your derived works under a
compatible license which does not restrict the rights of the users to
whom you sell or distribute your software.
Again, the fact that under certain restricted conditions it may be
possible to reuse the code does not eliminate the damage caused by the
restrictions that prevent many other uses.
--
Les Mikesell
lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
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