On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 7:27 AM, Jason van Gumster < [email protected]> wrote:
> > Alex Combas <[email protected]> wrote: > > > Similarly, virtually zero companies actually go the route of making a > > modified internal version of GPL software. > > How would someone confirm that? By virtue of the fact that it's not meant > for > external distribution, it's obviously something that wouldn't by widely > publicized. > > They aren't permitted legally to share their code, but there is nothing to restrict them to talk about what they are doing, but I haven't heard of any, have you? > Furthermore, I'm not sure how the 'sharing with 3rd party contractors > constitutes distribution' argument holds any water. Are you saying that > these > companies - many of which are used to treating source code as trade secret > - > are going to have trouble keeping code private and secret simply because > it's > linked to GPL code? I'm sorry, but that doesn't even begin to make sense to > me. > > First of all, you're trying to look at the argument logically and rationally. What makes you think that companies are logical and rational when it comes to their proprietary intellectual property? Imagine the fear that making just one false step and you could be legally forced to open-source your top secret proprietary project. There is actually a measure of rationality behind such a fear. Hey, did you just sell your partner a license to use your code? Guess what you just distributed it! Got any GPL code in there? Guess what, your whole code base could now be legally subject to the terms of the GPL. Whoops. Who is to say that in the future a company might not want to sell a license to one of their partners? This is why companies firewall their closed-source projects from their open-source projects, and are not likely to ever work on a closed source modifications for Blender even if they do not have any plans at the moment to ever distribute. _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
