I think GPL is great in that it publicly respects the inventors who creatively invent the tools and drivers for users who are willing to pay for it and thus generates profits for the commercial community and the inventors so that part of the community will be sustained and grown. The other aspect of the GPL license is that when the inventors who happen not to be the mainstream and have some great (either successful or awkward) ideas which they do not know if the mainstream world would accept it and pay for it, they can still distribute the ideas freely to the free world. One is to run some experiments to see if the new ideas and/or services will be accepted or rejected, and the other is fixing the ideas until they are mature to become a profit-generating-hulk. Surely that when a product is in its experimental stage, no one would like to pay for it. When we are talking about MS windows, there got to be some fees involved; and the beta users do not like the fees. If it is a free world, ie. the Linux world, users do not pay for their distributions and they tend to devote more time in configuring the system and also the software. Users in the Linux world also tend to provide more feedback to the programmers than the counterpart (MS windows) since it is a community in which everyone is trying the new idea and fixing the problems encountered. In the same process, the inventors get the idea of how to make their inventions better until they mature. The mature products are then incorporated into a package or ported to other platforms either through the commercial community or marginal fees requested by the inventors. Since we are the pioneers to test the cutting-edge tools, we definitely will encounter problems; and this is the case for all inventing world. We should be grateful to the inventors who share their ideas and also the community which create the place for everyone to have a part in the developing world. __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
