At 10:37 PM 2/9/2002, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >> In that case, it seems to me that his remarks are a complete non sequitur. >> The source code of "community" projects that license their work under the >> MIT X or BSD license is every bit as publicly available as that of projects >> that use the GPL. > >No, they are not. On the basis that a developer is not required to pass on >his code or make it available under X/BSD/etc licenses,
But a contributor to a community project, by definition, is doing so. >MANY of the best programmers on GPL or GPL-like projects are commercial >programmers in real life. This puts them at very serious risk. >Sure, you can say the GPL may taint your >programming. But whats to stop you being fired because your COMMERCIAL >work has influenced code you wrote for an open-source project? If you were to donate code to a collaborative project that is similar to code that you've seen at work, there can indeed be a problem. >It is a simple fact that thousands upon thousands of commercial >programmers work on open-source virally licensed projects. With no problem >at all. As several people in this discussion keep asking for landmark >cases to prove the effectiveness of then GPL - can you provide legal >documentation pointing to GPL contamination of a commercial project? I believe that there's a case in the courts involving MySQL right now, though I do not know all of the details. --Brett Glass
