Quoting Marius Amado Alves ([EMAIL PROTECTED]): > I know this, and this is the single 'wrong' thing about free software in > the view on many people (SDC, UUU, Alladin...) Putting the authors out > of the loop is silly and unfair.
If you don't like losing even that much of the ultimate control that's otherwise guaranteed to the copyright owner by copyright statutes, then don't. But then it's not open source. Nobody's forcing you or any other software author to use open source licensing. You're always perfectly free to use any proprietary licensing of your choosing. The open source community consists of coders and users who've become tired of some of the consequences of the proprietary model, and therefore have opted out. For example, even Dan Bernstein's software[1], as generous as his permission grants for them are, may not be lawfully maintained in any straightforward and long-term-feasible fashion by successor programmers, for lack of legal permission to create and distribute derivatives. A lot of us, long ago, got tired of being trapped using software that suddenly becomes no longer available, has restrictions on use, or cannot lawfully be maintained by its surrounding community. So, we gradually replaced it. The programmers of the resulting codebases? Nobody put them "out of the loop" in the sense you speak of. They decided by themselves, for diverse reasons, not to be there. If you, for your part, would rather not, that's OK. Nobody minds, and we can be friendly neighbours. You might even decide that the advantages of open source are compelling for some of your projects, even if not for most of yours. [1] A couple of his smaller and older packages are open source, but I'm referring here to his major and newer ones. -- Cheers, The shortest distance between two puns is a straightline. Rick Moen [EMAIL PROTECTED] -- license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3