From owner-freebsd-chat Sat Jul 13 12:23:32 1996 Return-Path: owner-chat Received: (from root@localhost) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) id MAA05596 for chat-outgoing; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:23:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de [141.76.1.11]) by freefall.freebsd.org (8.7.5/8.7.3) with SMTP id MAA05589 for ; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 12:23:26 -0700 (PDT) Received: from sax.sax.de by irz301.inf.tu-dresden.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with ESMTP id VAA07337; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 21:22:12 +0200 Received: (from uucp@localhost) by sax.sax.de (8.6.12/8.6.12-s1) with UUCP id VAA15591; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 21:22:12 +0200 Received: (from j@localhost) by uriah.heep.sax.de (8.7.5/8.6.9) id UAA01619; Sat, 13 Jul 1996 20:54:48 +0200 (MET DST) From: J Wunsch Message-Id: <199607131854.UAA01619@uriah.heep.sax.de> Subject: Re: What's so evil about GPL To: freebsd-chat@freebsd.org Date: Sat, 13 Jul 1996 20:54:48 +0200 (MET DST) Cc: miker@cs.utexas.edu (Hung Michael Nguyen) Reply-To: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de (Joerg Wunsch) In-Reply-To: <199607131746.MAA03210@oink.cs.utexas.edu> from Hung Michael Nguyen at "Jul 13, 96 12:46:12 pm" X-Phone: +49-351-2012 669 X-PGP-Fingerprint: DC 47 E6 E4 FF A6 E9 8F 93 21 E0 7D F9 12 D6 4E X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4ME+ PL17 (25)] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-chat@freebsd.org X-Loop: FreeBSD.org Precedence: bulk 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. ;-)