On Fri, 07 May 2010 23:40:22 -0700, Patrick Maupin wrote: > Personally, I believe that if anything is false and misleading, it is > the attempt to try to completely change the discussion from MIT vs. GPL > to GPL vs. no license (and thus very few rights for the software users), > after first trying to imply that people who distribute software under > permissive licenses (that give the user *more* rights than the GPL) are > somehow creating a some sort of moral hazard that might adversely affect > their users
If encouraging third parties to take open source code and lock it up behind proprietary, closed licences *isn't* a moral hazard, then I don't know what one is. For the record, I've published software under an MIT licence because I judged the cost of the moral hazard introduced by encouraging freeloaders to be less than the benefits of having a more permissive licence that encourages freeloading and therefore attracts more users. For other software, I might judge that the cost/benefit ratio falls in a different place, and hence choose the GPL. > So which is it? GPL good because a user can do more with the software > than if he had no license, or MIT bad because a user can do more with > the software than if it were licensed under GPL? Good or bad isn't just a matter of which gives you more freedoms, they're also a matter of *what* freedoms they give. Weaponized ebola would allow you to kill hundreds of millions of people in a matter of a few weeks, but it takes a very special sort of mind to consider that the freedom to bring about the extinction of the human race a "good". I consider the freedom granted by the MIT licence for my users to take my source code and lock it up behind restrictive licences (and therefore *not* grant equivalent freedoms to their users in turn) to be a bad, not a good. But in some cases it is a cost worth paying, primarily because not all people who use MIT-licenced software go on to re-publish it under a restrictive licence, but nevertheless won't consider the GPL (possibly due to misunderstandings, confusion or political interference). -- Steven -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
