On Tue, Mar 11, 2003 at 09:10:28PM -0500, David Turner wrote: > Someone already answered the google question for you -- it saves you the > 20k on a Google Search Appliance for your intranet.
That's akin to someone releasing the source of a neat, self-contained algorithm from an application. I can use it in my own programs, and improve other, unrelated things with it, or learn from it, or critique it. But it doesn't let me improve the application that it's from at all, since I don't have its source. Likewise, Google releasing source might have lots of other benefits, but it doesn't let me improve Google in any way, and I believe those "other benefits" are peripheral. Now, we seem to have two related but distinct cases: Google and BarInterface. In the case of Google, their releasing source simply doesn't let me improve Google--period. There's nothing that can be done about this. This applies to most "web apps", since the fundamental reason most web apps are web apps is either a) the server takes a lot of resources to run (Google), or b) the server connects a bunch of people together (eg. an IRC server). (case 1) In the case of BarInterface, it *may* be reasonable to run a separate copy of the server on my own system, with my enhancements. This is just about always the case when the example is something that was once a standalone application, and has been converted to ASP/RFC (eg. your GCC example). This is probably the more feared case of this--that someone will take my source, improve it, offer its use via ASP and not let anyone have the source; the fear that it's a means to get around having to give away your improvements. (case 2) I'd say case 2 is the only one that can be reasonably called a "loophole", and is the one Thomas is claiming simply isn't a problem. As I said above, I think it's fundamentally impossible to fix #1; releasing source to Google looks neat, but while it shares some nice side effects with releasing GCC's source, it doesn't let me (the user of the program--for the sake of discussion) improve the program (www.google.com), which is the primary, fundamental goal. I do think these two cases should be considered independently. The "provide the source to users of a webpage" discussion revolves around #1, which I think is distinct, and doesn't help #2 at all. -- Glenn Maynard
