"Russel Winder" <rus...@russel.org.uk> wrote in message news:mailman.3416.1302591172.4748.digitalmar...@puremagic.com... > >Personally I find licences such as BSD, MIT, ASL, etc. ones to avoid >since they allow organizations to take software, sell it for profit and >return absolutely nothing to the development community.
I've never seen that as a realistic concern. Here's the basic scenario: 1. I make program Foo and release it under BSD/MIT/etc. 2. The company EvilSoftwareCo takes Foo and sells it giving me nothing. That's what's seen as the problem, right? I'm not concerned because the obvious next steps are: 3. I go around spreading the fact that EvilSoftwareCo's Foo is available for free (both meanings of the term) from my site. 4. There isn't a fucking thing EvilSoftwareCo can do about it. "But what if EvilSoftwareCo makes proprietary changes to Foo and sells it as FooPlus? Your Foo doesn't get any of those extras!" Don't care. If they put in the time and effort to add value to something, then they *should* be allowed to ask for compensation for their work under whatever business model they choose. And if the value they've added is merely trivial, then A. My version of Foo can still compete and B. I can just add it to my Foo myself (or anyone else can).
