Re: Calling a program without knowing the parms

James, John, all,

The choice of license is very crucial.  They all have their good points and 
their
bad points.  It all depends on what your objective is.

You may want to take a look at http://www.opensource.org at the variety of
licenses that are available.  (And it doesn't hurt if you can read "legalese")

IMHO, if you want to write a module that anyone can use in their home grown 
apps,
by all means make it GPL.  On the other hand it is a "poison pill" to anyone
wanting to incorporate it into a commercial application because the GPL requires
that their entire app become GPL.

The Mozilla (Netscape) license, and the Open Source/400 General Open Source
Public License (GOSPL), which is based upon the Mozilla license, permit
commercial use with appropriate disclaimers and acknowledgments.  Therefore a
commercial enterprise can not mention their product without also stating that it
includes open source "free" software.  At the same time it allows a commercial
enterprise to build upon your work and spread your name.  Sort of like winning
the lottery.  If you read the fine print they can use your photo for promotional
purposes.  At the same time that they promote themselves, they promote you.

Like I said before, there are good points and bad points.  IMO, having my photo
appear in a lottery ad is right next to having it show up on a milk carton! ;-)

Now, this is different than having Linux as a GPL and the use of IBM's UDB 
within
Linux.  IBM's UDB is not a modification of Linux and is therefore not subject to
the GPL.  IBM's choice to make UDB "freeware" is a whole lot different than
making it "open source".

Once one makes a piece of software "open source" they must be willing to abandon
the direction and control of the software.  The software project takes on a life
of it's own.  At best, you retain a stewardship role so long as the participants
grant you that privilege.

James David Rich wrote:

> On Wed, 4 Jul 2001, John Ross wrote:
>
> > Ok, it is open source. I am not sure if it needs to be released with one of
> > the open source licenses or not. And if so which one. I want to do some
> > other open source projects so this will be a good place to start and work
> > out some of the kinks of handling open source projects.
>
> Please use the GNU GPL with open projects.  It makes integration with
> various distributions of linux much easier.  It also protects your work
> and everyone else's.

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