Mark wrote: I wonder if you could clarify why you insist upon GPL as opposed to a Berkeley-type or Apache-type license? I believe very strongly that both ends of the open source to commercial *spectrum* are entirely unreasonable and that there is a reasonable middle ground where we all can live and do what we need to do. GPL is *deliberately* way too far on the open source side of the spectrum.
I insist on the GPL for me (i.e. Texai) for reasons that I'll briefly mention in a moment, but I will not argue the wrongness of any other AGI project's licensing plans. What license I should use was vetted somewhat in this forum about a year ago. My post to Richard Loosemore, on the news that his work is not open source, saddens me as Texai will not be able exchange with him any of our released components. But Richard has his reasons and that's OK. The GPL is indeed viral by design, with the intent by its authors that it become pervasive. I agree with this idea but one can easily find better advocates than me to debate it. Rather, I am using the GPL for code, and the GNU Free Documentation License for content, to be as compatible as possible with the most highly motivated members of the open source, collaborative knowledge-building movement, in which legions of volunteers create great works, widely used, for the common good. My exemplar is MediaWiki for software, and Wikipedia for content creation, governance, and content building by volunteers. Here is another one of the reasons that I use the GPL, as stated in my first blog post a year ago: Contrary to naive intuition, the GPL precludes a lot of competition. Commercial firms rarely enter a market niche that is initially dominated by a freely available GPL product that meets customer needs. -Steve Stephen L. Reed Artificial Intelligence Researcher http://texai.org/blog http://texai.org 3008 Oak Crest Ave. Austin, Texas, USA 78704 512.791.7860 __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: http://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: http://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=98558129-0bdb63 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
