On Sat, 2004-06-05 at 13:18, Mary Gardiner wrote: > - for larger projects: LGPL or GPL, because I tend to be interested in > the health of the project more than the ability of people to use the > code for whatever purpose they like (distributing the code is healthy > for the project, distributing changes is healthy, but "making a > closed source fork" isn't because it won't help the project grow).
This is the crux of the argument isn't it. Whether we ensure the continued growth of FOSS. Is the use of FOSS code in applications that are closed a huge evil or do we want to propagate the use of FOSS code. If we have another programmer using the code and (hopefully) contributing bug fixes to a library then isn't this better for all. It is creating a standard. The other approach is the GPL approach that says that in order to strengthen GPL you must create GPL libraries and place a burden on the commercial programmer to choose between GPL or rewriting the functionality. The programmer must relearn a proprietary solution if they can find one because of the license or rewrite the library. What will happen to their next program? Will they contribute that code back? Unlikely and not useful if they do. -- Thanks KenF OpenOffice.org developer PS: Jeff & Rob, your words are noted and very correct. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html