Date: Sun, 14 Jul 1996 00:34:25 -0500 (EST) From: "John S. Dyson" <toor@dyson.iquest.net> To: nate@mt.sri.com (Nate Williams) Cc: joerg_wunsch@uriah.heep.sax.de, freebsd-chat@freebsd.org, miker@cs.utexas.edu Subject: Re: What's so evil about GPL Message-ID: <199607140534.AAA03007@dyson.iquest.net> In-Reply-To: <199607140437.WAA13056@rocky.mt.sri.com> from "Nate Williams" at Jul 13, 96 10:37:44 pm
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> > J. Wunsch writes: > > 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: > > [ Point 1 deleted ] > > > . 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 *forced* to distribute any changes you make (significant > and/or insignficant) as sources, which may be difficult for 'political' > reasons or for technical reasons. > Or for economic ones. We live in a NON-GPL world, and it is likely to stay so for a long-long time. I am simply not young enough to change the world's economic system before I die. >If the reason your product is > 'better' than your competitors product happens to be something that took > a significant amount of time and $$ to develop, having to give away the > source code means you are much less likely to recoup your investment. > I don't mind giving away other's source code (if they wish, and if it doesn't cost me very much to do so), however the cost of IP is not ZERO, and in fact can be very high. I choose to give away my IP that I produce for FreeBSD, and thank goodness, I can grab a copy of FreeBSD for my commercial use -- make proprietary mods to my hearts content, and sell it in a toaster :-). I don't have to worry about redistribution encumberances or encumberances of IP that I don't choose to free. My work on free software is funded by my work on proprietary software, and my employer happens to accept and support my work with "that-a-boy", but no money :-(. > > So, many of the folks who distribute GPL sources (Redhat, Caldera) > copyright their packaging of the sources, but not the sources > themselves. > So a distribution that is made up of GPLed code isn't GPL copyrighted :-). Sounds like a very consistant situation to me :-). I like simple licenses, simple rules, and sure wish we could FREE FreeBSD of all GPL and other restrictive IP encumberances. The runtime and kernel are pretty free already, but the development tools and certain utilties are unfortunately encumbered. John
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