Date: Sat, 18 Mar 2000 00:03:51 -0700 From: Brett Glass <brett@lariat.org> To: Rahul Siddharthan <rsidd@physics.iisc.ernet.in>, Terry Lambert <tlambert@primenet.com> Cc: J McKitrick <j_mckitrick@bigfoot.com>, freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: On "intelligent people" and "dangers to BSD" Message-ID: <4.2.2.20000317235837.03e7ac10@localhost> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.20.0003180950460.6691-100000@theory1.physics.ii sc.ernet.in> References: <200003172130.OAA21283@usr02.primenet.com>
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At 09:43 PM 3/17/2000 , Rahul Siddharthan wrote: >Those are 3 possibilities. > >However, I think you left out something else (I'm not being >categorical on this, since I'm not in the computer business): as >I understand it, the great majority of software engineers (I once >heard a figure of 90%, at least in India) are into custom-written >software, not packaged stuff like Oracle. The software firms are >contracted by companies to write this, and it is not distributed >but used only under the company's own roof for its own purposes. >In that case the licence is really irrelevant; the GPL doesn't >force anyone to redistribute the code. According to Bruce Perens, Version 3 of the GPL will. Bait and switch. >Another money-making scheme, directly off the GPL, is what Peter >Deutsch did for Ghostscript (though this is not something >Stallman approved of): he has three licensing schemes, the GPL >for year-old software, a very restrictive "free licence" for the >latest version, and a commercial licence. Deutch is still bitter about the fact that the GPL didn't keep commercial entities from using his code, as Stallman claimed. He was deceived into putting the GPL on his product, and has paid for that ever since. (He was able to make a fair amount of money from custom programming -- some of which included adapting GhostScript for embedded systems. But he didn't profit from the code itself, because anyone who really wanted to could use it for free.) --Brett Glass To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-chat" in the body of the message
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