On Sun, Jan 20, 2008 at 06:23:31PM +0000, Dave Crossland wrote: > How would you feel if some developer who receive your program can > improve it and then tell people, even you as the original author, that > you can't share that version with your friends, or see how their > improvement works, or build upon their work as they built upon yours?
I am a CouchDB developer. <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CouchDB> We recently switched from GPL to the Apache licence. Now, I would like to get it out of the way that I am unhappy with the switch, but as I am not the primary developer, I decided to go along with the move. The reason I am not happy is because Amazon could come along one day and take all the code I had slaved over for so many hours, put a team of 10 developers on improving it full time, and then release as a competing product, be that closed source or via a web service. Suddenly, all that time I had put into the project is being used against me to compete. Not only that, but the competing product is completely non-free, so it's not like /anyone/ benifits. > Sean mentions GPLv3 may be criticised for being "too complicated" but > that seems like a sham to me; the GPL isn't longer than an average > sunday newspaper article and is written for a software developer > audience in mind. Lets remember that we are talking about legal documents here, not poems. That the GPL is so long is a testiment to how complicated copyright law is any how many precautions need to be taken to prevent things like I just described from happening. -- Noah Slater <http://bytesexual.org/> "Creativity can be a social contribution, but only in so far as society is free to use the results." - R. Stallman - Sent via the backstage.bbc.co.uk discussion group. To unsubscribe, please visit http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/archives/2005/01/mailing_list.html. Unofficial list archive: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/
