On Mon, 29 Aug 2005, Hendrik Weimer wrote:
Companies which are totally risk-averse may decide to compile static
images using proprietary libraries and compilers, at extra cost, but
they retain 100% of their copyright even if having to pay distribution
license royalties to Borland or Intel or whoever else....
I think that's rather the question if you want to spend money on
licenses or on legal advice.
Either way costs money. Avoiding both ways usually ends up costing more
money or a lot of public egg on the face.
GPL is not the boogeyman people make out. It is still a licensing
method and in the end the author stil retains copyright. If anything
it enhances the author's rights while still making the code available
for use.
Don't tell Microsoft that all the BSD-like code they use is
illegal. :-)
The BSD license allows for proprietary code lockup and that's regarded as
a maojor problem with it in some circles. GPL was in some ways a reaction
to what some comapnies were doing with BSD licensed code.
Without GPL, it is impossible to legally use much code and that's
where companies fall over - they always have the option of
attempting to negotiate an indiivual copyright assignment with a
software autohor if they don't want to use GPL.
That depends on the development model. It is impossible to get a
seperate license for the Linux kernel because there are too many
copyright owners, probably including some who don't have to do
anything with the kernel development at all.
Which means that a company wanting to do a particular task would need to
look at BSD, QNX, or even OSF1 kernels. Some authors refuse to negotiate
individual licenses too - and that's fully within their rights to do so.
Microsoft et al hate GPL because it means they have to publish the source
code for derivative works, whereas if they use BSD-licensed code they can
claim all derivatives as proprietary and simply acknowledge BSD - even
then they failed to do this for a long time (MS has a fairly long history
of code theft going right back to its foundation). Either way is making
use of the intellectual property of others without paying for it, one
allows higher profit margins.
AB
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