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

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

Curt Sampson writes:

 > 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."

Hey, IP is the legal version of the dog in the manger.  It *doesn't*
hurt me to let other people use my software, I lose nothing (except
revenue).  I think that when you've got an infinite amount of sand,
putting up a fence around the sandbox is *not nice*.  Remember, you
and everybody who looks like you can play in that stadium *at the same
time as the rest of us*.

The world is not a nice place.  If it were, as Bette Midler sang,
"we'd all have just enough."  The world of work is especially not a
nice place.  I don't have a problem with people who put being
productive over playing nice *for themselves*, for part of the time.
But playing nice is playing nice.

 > 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.

Yeah, so put that hammer down, Curt.  Your first mistake was writing
an OA app, and it's all downhill from there. :-)

Anyway, that's a bad example.  I know at least one lawyer who wanted
to fight that exact case, and one who has published a book in which he
says that you'd win if you took it to court.  (They may be the same
person, the first was Ghostscript's lawyer, the second is Larry Rosen.)

 > > 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.

Neither one.  You're looking at Stallman and his drooling Rottweilers.
I'm looking at Stefan Monnier and Linus Torvalds.