On Fri, 16 Jun 2006 13:19:47 -0500 Les Mikesell <lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx> wrote: > That's not clear at all. There's plenty of useful software with > less restrictive licenses and not much to demonstrate any > cause and effect between the GPL and development. X and nfs > probably wouldn't have been created at all under GPL; perl wisely > uses a dual license to avoid being locked in or out of either camp. The proof is that there are authors that choose the GPL because it makes sense to them. The fact that many of these projects develop healthy ecosystems is enough for me to believe in the GPL. But there are other good open source licenses too, and there is a place where proprietary licenses make sense too. But I sure don't see any of that as a reason to work up an anger against anyone that chooses the GPL, its their business. > Or, they just put up with it because most of the time it doesn't > do too much damage to the existing projects. It's almost certain > that all of us also run software under different licenses with > no ill effects to the machines or users. Gcc is probably the only > thing that everyone really needs that is GPL'd, although the *bsd > kernels might not run on quite as much hardware as linux these days. Well we all have to put up with whatever license an author chooses to release his work under, be it proprietary, BSD, or GPL. Sean
