Re: [tlug] Bill Gates and the GPL , let the flames begin

[Curt Sampson <cjs@example.com>]

On 2008-04-26 01:22 +0900 (Sat), Kenneth Burling wrote:

> I like the "Do whatever the hell you want" approach... And if someone
> finds some way to make his copy of the code non-free... Guess what, my
> copy is still good to go. :P

Indeed!

On 2008-04-26 03:34 +0900 (Sat), Stephen J. Turnbull wrote:

> Be careful here.  The GPL is the exact equivalent in legal language of
> "you play nicely with *my* ball, or I'm going to take *my* ball and go
> home".  It's not very grownup, but it doesn't necessarily imply an
> attempt to control what others do.

I don't think that just "play nicely" is quite the right way of putting
it. It's more like, "if you happen to build a football stadium in which
to use my ball, you have to let everybody play in it for free, forever."

If I happen to have spent a lot of time and effort writing, say, an
office suite, and I link the few-thousand-line readline library with my
millions of lines of code, I then have to give away all my code (which
the readline authors had nothing to do with writing) and its build
system to everyone, for free, in perpetuity. Ouch.

> Given that this arises from a pragmatic stance that "sharing is fun"
> and a philosophical stance that the creator deserves no reward for the
> creation, I think copyleft advocates need a "fsck -y" of the wetware.
> And rms is definitely a control freak of the psychotic sort.

Indeed.

Had the BSD TCP stack been GPL'd, thus forcing everyone using it to give
away source for all of their OSes etc. for free if they used it, you can
bet that a lot of copiers out there would be speaking only MS protocols
right now, and either doing it poorly or doing it using MS-licensed
code.

> But there are plenty of copyleft advocates who (nonetheless) take a
> sort of conscientious objector stance: they just refuse to play with
> those who won't play by their rules.  It's an exercise of freedom of
> association for them, not an attempt to control others.

Well, that's certainly no less incorrect than my way of looking at it,
on the surface. Yet our ways of looking at it are different. I wish I
could find and express the key difference here, so I could at least
figure out which view is really more accurate.

cjs
-- 
Curt Sampson       <cjs@example.com>        +81 90 7737 2974   
Mobile sites and software consulting: http://www.starling-software.com