lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Thu, 2006-01-19 at 12:47, David G. Miller (aka DaveAtFraud)
It really does come down to a socialism vs. capitalism argument in the
end. The pro [L]GPL crowd points to a claimed beneficial leveling
affect by everyone having access to everything and the pro closed source
crowd points out that they won't work unless they see a profit from
their labor.
Yet, there are plenty of projects that are freely available and
open source without the GPL restrictions. Where do the *bsd, X,
apache, perl, mozilla, etc. licenses fall in your claimed dichotomy?
It is possible to share things without everyone following the
same manifesto.
-- Les Mikesell
Just as there are many points between capitalism and socialism.
Likewise, just because someone donates to the poor hardly turns them
into a socialist. For the purposes of this discussion (assuming it
still has a purpose), the differences are clearest arguing at the endpoints.
I really do see a need for a GPL-like restriction on creating true
derivative works based on free software created by others. I think the
success of GPLed software in attracting developers shows that people are
more willing to donate their time and effort if they know that someone
else can't simply pick up whatever they have created, re-package it
somehow and sell it. That being said, I see a whole world of difference
between modifying someone else's work and writing a program that runs
"on top of" a base created by others. Perhaps that's because I've been
doing that for quite a few years and I haven't had a single OS vendor
(IBM, CDC, DEC, HP, SUN, or Microsoft) come back and demand I change how
I license the code I created simply because it runs on their platform.
mike.mccarty@xxxxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I don't "hope to extract money" from people, and object to the use
of the term wrt me.
Mike, I'm an unabashed capitalist. I look at it as businesses extract
money from customers in exchange for alleviating a perceived need of the
customer. The important part is not the word describing the direction
the money moves but that the exchange be one of freely agreed to value
for value. This covers the people who sell snake oil as well as folks
like your father who understood that making the customer happy is what
brought back both the customer and his friends, family, etc. Funny
thing is that people who use expressions like "...hope to extract
money..." pejoratively seem to focus strictly on the movement of the
money and not on the goods or services that the customer gets in return.
Cheers,
Dave
