On Wed, Feb 09, 2005 at 12:44:50PM +1000, QuantumG wrote: > But that's not the argument. The argument is whether or not the > community would benefit more from having someone like RealNetworks not > demand copyright assignment. I believe they would because any > extensions RealNetworks makes to the work of contributors will remain free.
But consider what the alternatives are: 1) Helix is copyleft with no copyright assignment (no proprietary version). 2) Helix is copyleft with copyright assignment (proprietary version). 3) Helix is proprietary only. 1 is unlikely, since Real gets limited revenues. 2 is what we have now. 3 is the other practical alternative. Scrubbing 1 because it's not going to happen, we have a choice between a largely-free Helix and a totally non-free Helix. Which one do you want? No, you can't answer option 1 because Real isn't going to allow that. > Suppose I wasn't happy with RealNetwork's ad-serving.. maybe my > customers were complaining that the ads take up too much bandwidth or > something. I can't fix that. Well boo-hoo, I gave up my freedom to get > that silly feature so it's my own problem. Say I decide to do something > about it and write an ad-serving extension for the open source > distribution. Are RealNetworks going to accept my patch? Presumably > not. That's a terrible situation for the community to be in. So someone releases a fork of Helix with their own ad-serving patch in. - Matt -- "I'm tempted to try Gentoo, but then I learned that its installer is in Python, and, well, a base Python install on my system is something like fifty megabytes (for what? oh, right, we NEED four XML libraries, I forgot)." -- Dave Brown, ASR
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