On Wednesday 06 December 2006 05:03, Evan Lavelle wrote: > That's what it's for, as you point out. It's not a subtlety. > Where would Spice be now if it hadn't initially been BSD'ed? > We'd have got something else, of course, but i suspect we > wouldn't have heard of 'Spice'.
Actually I think we would have been better off. The big ones would have been happy to pay some money to buy commercial rights. The smaller parasitic ones probably wouldn't exist. Some others that now pay nothing back would actually pay something back, supporting more research. We would likely not be using a 15 year old crappy rewrite of what was then 10 year old technology today. > The business of universities is disseminating knowledge, with > no strings attached. It's not such a big deal if someone > makes money out of it; we all have to make money. In fact, > it's essential that the process of giving away knowledge, > without strings, should create wealth, or there would be no > universities in the first place. As I said, it is intentional. There is nothing wrong with it, except that it makes it harder for the university to make money. The problem is that the BSD type license encourages private use and litigation from parasitic companies that give nothing back to the university, other than legal problems. Several high profile lawsuits in the EDA industry have their roots in this BSD license problem. > The real tragedy is that universities have been continuously > moving away from this open model, and seeking to close and > protect their knowledge, primarily through the patent system. That's true. It is tragic that false statements about GPL are so extreme that they don't realize that something like GPL is the solution to their problem. Fortunately, some universities do realize this. > This is absurd, but the opposite extreme - as exemplified by > the GPL - is equally absurd. What sort of message is this > giving out? Here's the message: We want to share with those who share with us. If you want to make a commercial derivative, contact us and we can make arrangements. When you see a license, any license, it says what you can do without any additional action. If you are a business, there is nothing stopping you from contacting the owner and negotiating a different arrangement. Legitimate businesses know this and negotiate. Illegitimate businesses whine about it. A lot of GPL software is funded this way. > Perhaps "see how smart we are, but don't touch - > this is what we do with all your taxes"? There are honourable > exceptions, of course - Antlr, for example, from Terence Parr > at the University of San Francisco - smart guy, smart > licence. > > The uncomfortable truth: the GPL is simply pointless > religious bigotry. Making money is not evil; it's a fact of > life. There, I said it. Somebody had to. The GPL says I want to share, but I don't want you to steal my work, block it, and use it for your profit without giving me any. I have nothing against making money. I do have a problem with "business" people who want to steal code to make their business, giving nothing at all back to the developers of any kind. As DJ said ... "don't talk about a license unless you've actually read it and understand it." _______________________________________________ geda-user mailing list geda-user@moria.seul.org http://www.seul.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/geda-user