On Thu, 2006-06-15 at 09:09 -0700, Peter Gordon 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? Absolutely. On the one hand this encourages companies like RedHat and IBM that make their money on selling services and hardware to pour resources into it knowing that someone else can't improve it in a way that would compete against them, but on the other hand it means the end user won't be able to get that improved product. > 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; Thus producing more choices... > 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 No, this means certain things can't ever be included. > 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? I don't see how the license has any bearing at all here. Can you give an example of Linux vs. (say) one of the *BSD's where using the GPL matters in this regard. > > 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. An OSX like system, complete with drivers for all hardware and other licensed components along with a GPL'd kernel. > > 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. Copyrights and patents are very different approaches. Microsoft has not chosen to enforce any patent protection against samba yet but that doesn't mean they can't or won't. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
