Tim McNamara wrote;
> On May 24, 2012, at 1:00 PM, Jeff Barnes wrote: >> >> Wouldn't your time be more wisely spent trying to get corporate sponsors? I >> see a lot more success stories in the open source world where a corporation >> donates developers to projects the company have an interest in. > > Hmm. OpenOffice for example?* Would you stipulate that there are successful GPL projects involving corporate sponsors? >> As in, 1) convince a large publishing house they'd be better off relying on >> an open source music engraver, 2) get hired by them and 3) bingo, your >> dream job. >> >> There are risks. The project could fork, the corporation may have different >> goals than yours, etc. > > Those are not risks. They are guarantees. And most assuredly few > corporate sponsors would permit the project to be published under the > GPL. The notion of "owing" intellectual property has become so very > deeply ingrained in corporate culture around the world that the GPL is > a dealbreaker. My company, a large cable provider in the US, uses a lot of GPL code in its distributed products. It also donates developer time to many of those projects. > The notion of users having freedom is anathema to most. That may be true of some, perhaps "most" as you put it. But I think the deal breaker is more along the lines of losing some perceived competitive advantage by having to give back optimizations or improvements to the codebase. I don't think that's necessarily applicable to Lily. The end product being distributed is paper (or perhaps a pdf file). I don't think the GPL extends to that, does it? One doesn't need to make Lily source code notices on every piece of music they distribute engraved with LilyPond, do they? Also, do I understand correctly that a company could make changes to the source code and use it without giving it back? They probably should to be good citizens, but are they required to do so if they don't distribute LilyPond according to GPL? But most forward thinking publishing companies would give the source code back. After all, their core business isn't LilyPad, it's publishing. Somebody help me with my wrong thinking. :) Regards, Jeff _______________________________________________ lilypond-user mailing list lilypond-user@gnu.org https://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/lilypond-user
