Mike Meyer wrote: <cut> > > Well, they chose to make it available to others for reuse. But > software "unavailable to those who can't afford it" is better than "no > software at all"
That I do not agree with, I think it depends on which your side of the fence you are. For instance I have a specific problem, there are currently 2 product available that come close to solving it, one costs $24,999 and the other is above that. That is about $23,999 above what I can afford to solve my problem, so I have the option to leave the problem as it is or try to tackle it myself. Stubborn that I am, I am currently creating my own solution, knowing well that other solutions exist and I can only make a poor copy of those already existing effort > >> However I make a poor defender for the GPL because, as you can read in >> my previous posts, I don't really believe in it. > > The question is wether or not it believes in you :-) > > I believe in GPL'ed software - I use it regularly. On the other hand, > I don't believe that it represents the best license to release > software if the goal is to improve the lot of humanity. The > restrictions are on "distribution", not on use, so it doesn't really > keep people from using said software commercially. For instance, one > or more of your examples may have been worth developing for internal > use. They then decided there was a profit to be made in distributing > it commercially, and proceeded to do so because they could. Without > the profit motive, they may not have done the extra work involved in > preparing the IP for distribution and doing the distribution. Yeah well, GPL works reasonable well but perhaps not for what it was intended. > > Personally, I release stuff under a BSD-like license, historically > having included requirements that I be notified of bug fixes, and/or > that I be given copies of commercial software that included my code. I > eventually gave up on them as unenforceable. Thats the trouble with restrictions, how do you enforce them, with license I don't found it worth the hazzle. BSD/MIT style license is a good substitute of no license at all. -- mph -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
