Thanks for bringing that up Matt, I've been working on a in depth reply for Sunnz, but I also have other things that require my time so I'm a bit slow at developing my replies - and then I really need to proof read them for incorrect words, correctly spelled... sigh...
Actually I do live talks at the local college on this subject every so often, but I always do them 'cold', so each one is verbally different, but contextually consistent. I'm having some fun trying to actually write down the way I verbally relate to this subject when I have a live group to work with. It's also an education for me, as the interplay when I can interact with a group, face to face, is easy for me --but this writing it down business, now that is much more difficult. I'm hoping that Sunnz has been reading Mike Masnick's work at Techdirt. That was/is a brilliant series of essays. They should be required reading. Here's the final summary, with links back to all the essays: http://techdirt.com/articles/20070503/012939.shtml Thanks, Don. *********************************** On Saturday 05 May 2007 08:16 pm, Matthew Flaschen wrote: Sunnz wrote: > Another tricky thing to develop games on Linux is GPL. > > Ok, I don't know that much about the underlying workings of GNU, so I > am on the assumption that a lot of programming API and libraries on > Linux are licensed under GPL, and if you make use of the API and libs, > your game would be a derivative software and have to license under > GPL. That's pretty much wrong. There's plenty of proprietary software on GNU/Linux, because core libraries tend to be licensed under the LGPL (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html), not the GPL. > The implication of GPL is that you are free to distribute the > software, binary and/or source code... companies who have invest large > sum of money wouldn't want to do this, perhaps it is ok to open source > the code, but they certainly want people to pay for each copy. Open Source (or free/libre licenses) do not require per-copy royalties. Open source (and free/libre software) means far more than source code availability. See opensource.org/docs/definition.php and gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html . It's also a misconception that it's impossible to make money off libre/open source software. Consider the many successful companies that rely almost solely on FOSS (Red Hat, Alfresco, etc.) Best, Matt Flaschen _______________________________________________ Advocate mailing list [email protected] http://badvista.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/advocate -- GNU/Linux is the future. Join the FSF: http://www.fsf.org/register_form?referrer=4458 Get the Real Facts: http://BadVista.org _______________________________________________ Advocate mailing list [email protected] http://badvista.fsf.org/mailman/listinfo/advocate
