RE: LINUX is the "one" ? .... Comments???

Yeah, the GPL is the "extreme" Open Source license.  However, it does not
mean that you can't ever sell anything that's been on your hard drive.  It
just means that you can't sell software that includes anything derived
from, or including code from, or a modified version of the GPLed software.

If you want to include GPL software with something you're selling, it has
to be a separate package, unmodified from it's original, and you have to
be able to freely get the original and the source and use that instead.

You're right, the GPL is (slightly) "communist."  However, if you say
that, you have to be fair and say that most commercial software licenses today
are "fascist."

The original open source software was created in universities, generally
under the MIT or BSD licenses.  These were much more free, because the
universities were doing this for research and the quest for improvment.
These people don't care that someone else takes their software that they
developed for free and uses it commercially.

But, today there is a lot coming from people who just want to "give back"
to the people who gave free software to them.   These people is who the
GPL appeals to, because they gave up their free time to create software,
and they don't want someone else making a profit from it.

I'm not saying this to argue with you, JT.  I know you and I won't ever
agree, and I respect your right to your opinion.   However, I want other
people who read this forum to see both sides of things and make their own
decisions.

And the assertion that open source is somehow hurting innovation is
completely baseless.  There's been an awful lot of innovation coming from
the open-source world!  Almost all of the internet is based on open
technologies.  The first web servers (CERN, etc) were open.  The first web
browsers were open.   E-mail, etc... all open.   Then the big companies
like Microsoft take these ideas, and develop them heavily and reap great
rewards from them.

If anything, the opposite is true.  It's companies like Microsoft who seek
to dominate that stifle innovation.   You can't go out there and start a
new company that makes, let's say, a word processor.  You'd never survive,
no matter how much you innovate, because everyone will use MS Office.
Why?  Because everyone else is using MS Office, and they want to be
compatible with their friends.   New computers come with MS Office.
The work it would take to develop something that would compete would
require too much work and capital to really make it worthwhile.

That's what's stifling innovation.   Open Source is, so far, the only
thing that's made it possible to try to compete with that.

On Thu, 3 Apr 2003, jt wrote:

> <poking head in here fer a sec, and still haven't caught up on entire
> thread...>  No, Scott.  The GPL is there to establish a monopoly so that ALL
> GPL'd software is free.  See the Free Software Foundation and GNU
> principles.  Sure, there's LGPL and many other licenses that are better.
>
> But the purpose of the GPL is to set up a framework where ALL software (and,
> eventually, EVERYTHING that can be stored on a hard drive) CAN NOT be SOLD.
> This is the stated goals of RMS (Richard M. Stallman) and FSF.   This
> doesn't even work well in the Academic Community which He works in.  (He
> SURE ain't a software developer, in any sense the term as I know it.)  But
> somehow this communist approach to software development has been sold to the
> business community, in spite of that.
>
> Not saying the GPL has single-handedly KILLED the market for TRUE INNOVATION
> in software, the past decade...  There were other factors, too.
>