"Steve Teale" <steve.te...@britseyeview.com> wrote in message news:j7v048$1ut1$1...@digitalmars.com... > I'd never seen it before - maybe I lead a sheltered life. > > GPL: "Free as in Herpes" > > Doesn't that just hit the nail on the head. >
Hah! Classic :) Even ignoring the viral nature, the "hundred page wall of legalese" alone is enough to make me very, very nervous about going anywhere near it (same goes for creative commons). Not to mention the thousand different versions of [L]GPL. But I find those issues extremely frustrating, because there's two things I do like about GPL: - From what I've heard, it bans usage in the creation of closed/proprietary platforms and devices. (I've come to have a enormous seething hatred for such things. Absolutely fed up with them.) I'm sure I could make a derivative of zlib/libpng/etc. that adds such a prohibition clause, but that would kick it out of the "OSI-approved" category, and would probably create a bit of a PR problem. (Plus I imagine I'd probably need to hire a lawyer to make sure it would actually work as intended.) - Dual-licensing software under both GPL and paid-proprietary is feasable. I've never been able to think of a way to do the same with something more free like zlib/libpng/BSD/MIT/etc, and I think about that a lot. The only ways to get paid with those seems to be donations (would that ever even earn enough for a pizza? and are there any realistic options besides FraudPal *cough* I mean PayPal?) and paid support (which isn't always particularly applicable to every program; not everythng really needs much support).