On Sat, 2006-06-17 at 12:35, Craig White wrote: > > > > There was a free software community before the GPL, and there > > still is. Don't pretend that everyone has ever agreed that > > the GPL restrictions are a good idea - or that they ever will. > ---- > RMS through various efforts and refinement of ideas with help from > others 'defined' the form of the free software community as it exists > today but there has always been a 'public domain' that pre-existed > before RMS, etc. He has tried to redefine the term 'free' to mean restricted and certainly is the major force in the GPL community. But don't confuse that with open source in general. Less restricted licenses and projects using them continue with their success and useful purpose. > GPL is the assurance that the code never legally enters some companies > proprietary packages. GPL means that an effort to 'embrace, extend and > extinguish' can never occur (as long as we are on the Microsoft topic). But, with less restricted code whatever the original authors want to publish remains free and available regardless of what anyone else does with it. The only net result of the GPL is a reduction in the available choices. Someone can't add a proprietary improvement and sell it for the incremental difference. Which means I don't have the option to buy that. > I can appreciate that Les' big axe here is device drivers - he has made > that clear enough over time because Linux packaging can never make use > of proprietary device drivers for companies that cannot or will not > release their drivers as open source. His supposition is that the GPL > prevents them from doing so and it many cases, this is likely true. That's just today's hot button. The point is that there is a lot of other code around, some of it available under terms an end user might find attractive, and none of it can be used as an improvement to any GPL'd component. > Anyone who remembers the BSD TCP/IP code stack in Windows NT knows why > some people prefer GPL license over BSD type licenses...it absolutely > prevents the 'embrace, extend, extinguish' of donated code making its > way into proprietary software. Beg to differ here. Microsoft originally wrote their own code and anyone who had to co-exist on a LAN with those early products (like the win95 version that got the retry timer backwards and increased the rate instead of backing off on congested networks) should have been thrilled when they got it right somewhere around win98se/win2k no matter where they got the code. Everyone benefits when a well tested, secure code base is reused instead of starting from scratch and re-inventing all the protocol incompatibilities and security exploits that have already been solved in free code. As much as I dislike Microsoft's monopoly, I'd prefer that they sensibly use as much correctly working code as possible to avoid disrupting everything else. > yeah, so it slows down development of device drivers...big deal And where patents are involved the slowdown will be for the life of the patent - or until someone contributes it to the public. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx
