Sean Chittenden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote, in part: > Why does everyone insist that they're protecting my interests by > likening a piece of BSD code that goes closed source as a bad thing or > as if it's not what I want? That is precisely what I want people to > be able to do! That's a smart business for reusing someone else's > wheel design, kinda like a dated patent.
If you are a small software shop, you sell services. So, what is the biggest threat to that line of work? Commoditization and customer lock-in to big-vendor proprietary solutions. GPL tilts the playing field against that. (I am not "insisting" you adopt GPL, just explaining one reason why GPL helps the small shop and IS a rational decision.) And yes, if you are selling a software library, we can see why BSD-licensed code is more "sellable" than GPL-licensed code. The market is better. But you haven't made your point as to why a "BSD+anti-copyleft" is more sellable, unless your customer is MicroSoft, or other company hoping to segment the world of open source software into as many incompatible islands as possible. > The GPL is like the > perpetual patent though, it never expires and becomes usable to other > businesses. *shudder* It only took you two paragraphs to break your promise to maintain the distinction between closed source and commercial. GPL software is extremely usable in business.[1] If you can't keep your promise on the distinction, don't post any more. Forrest [1] Examples abound, but one that comes to mind is an business who would never dream of releasing the code I write for them under the GPL or any OSI certified license, but very happily uses GnuPG and the Windows drag-n-drop program I gave them to send me proprietary data via email. They didn't want to open up their VPN to me and PKZIP encryption isn't very good. Very cool. -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3