On Sat, 2006-02-18 at 15:07, Peter Gordon wrote: > Perhaps, but the GPL is excellent in that it *enforces* the Freedoms, > and actively prevents people from changing it just a little and making > that new product proprietary. Which has no effect on the amount or quality of free software. Do you consider yourself competent to decide for yourself if you want to use a proprietary product for some purpose or other? Do you really need some fanatic dictating your choices for you? > In effect, it *guarantees* that *anyone* > who gets a copy of the program *must* have the freedoms to study, > modify, and/or redistribute the program under these same conditions. It accomplishes that by reducing the amount of software than can be available. It can't force people to make new software, it can only prevent people from sharing their work in any way not dictated by the GPL. > The MIT/X11 and revised BSD licenses (along with other similar licenses) > are usually for the benefit of the developers (essentially, anything > done with such code is legal so long as copyright notices and such are > left intact); whereas the GPL in fact is for the distinct benefits of > the end-users (who could be, potentially, developers too). Many useful software components have been released back under freely redistributable licenses by companies that used and improved them in proprietary products. I don't see how anyone can find fault with that model. NFS probably wouldn't exist otherwise, along with a lot of the X code. This code has the same benefit to the end user as anything GPL'd. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
