Les Mikesell wrote:
> Yes and we all use them. Your linux distribution contains
> much bsd/mit/apache/perl licensed code - licenses that do
> not restrict competition and additional improvements and
> have resulted in many useful products.
So you think that the GPL does limit competition then?
I strongly disagree with you. I'd say that the BSD/MIT-style copyright licenses
serve only to *hinder* competition, in that other people can use the code and
make a proprietary derivative of it; whereas competition among GPL-licensed
code means that they can all share their code with and borrow code from one
another, which means that they would therefore be (in theory) about
feature-equivalent and would need to continuously prove their superiority to
potential users and developers in other ways (such as: What is the quality of
the codebase? What attention is paid to proactive security? What kind of UI
does it have? Does it follow standards from bodies such as FreeDesktop.org,
the
W3C, POSIX, etc. depending on its usage goal? How intensive is it in terms of
memory and processor usage? What packaging options does it offer? What other
software does it depend on to be installed at build- or runtime? What is the
quality of its interoperability with other applications or system
environments?
How attentive is upstream to bug reports, ptches, feature requests, etc.?)
> Yes, preventing many similar useful products.
Please name one specific product example that has been prevented from being
marketed and/or sold by the GPL.
> They claim that distributing a program that uses a gpl'd library is a
> copyright violation even if it does not include the library in the
> distribution. There is no other way to describe that
> besides stopping the distribution of another person's original
> work.
In this case, the "original work" is in fact based on that GPL'd
library, and so would probably be a derivative work instead and, thus, would
need to comply with the GPL on those terms. (Note though, that I am not a
lawyer or law student, etc.)
> Like you said earlier - laws can change, And there are places
> besides Europe.
As I understand it, it (Samba) was reverse-engineered strictly for the
purposes of interoperability. This is considered fair, and is legal under
international copyright law.
-
Peter Gordon (codergeek42)
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