Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 20:54:48 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch <j@uriah.heep.sax.de> To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Cc: miker@cs.utexas.edu (Hung Michael Nguyen) Subject: Re: What's so evil about GPL Message-ID: <199607131854.UAA01619@uriah.heep.sax.de> In-Reply-To: <199607131746.MAA03210@oink.cs.utexas.edu> from Hung Michael Nguyen at "Jul 13, 96 12:46:12 pm"
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As Hung Michael Nguyen wrote: > I have heard many a times on the various FreeBSD fora that GPL is in some > way 'bad'. Can somebody clue me in as to exactly why (esp. vs. the BSD > copyright)? Basically, three points here: . It's bloated. You need a dozen lawyers to understand it, and of course, they won't understand it either, but come up with 13 different opinions instead. :) . You are forced to become a software redistribution institution once you have modified some of the source code, and intend to redistrib- ute your modified work. . You are explicitly requested to demand at most the distribution costs as a fee, but nothing more. While this basically seems to be a good idea, consider the following: Some of our customers live in a world where they believe that good software must be expensive. If you offer them something for say USD 100, they won't pick it but buy for example something like sc0 instead. You *have* to offer them the freeware stuff for money, in order to even get it into consider- ation! (This doesn't change a bit in the overall gain we would make out of it. We only slightly shuffle the figures we're presenting them. But with GPL, you are legally not allowed to offer it for money.) In short: the GPL is good for an ideal world. Alas, we live in a real world. -- cheers, J"org joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de -- http://www.sax.de/~joerg/ -- NIC: JW11-RIPE Never trust an operating system you don't have sources for. ;-)
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