On Tue, Aug 17, 2004 at 09:54:05AM -0400, Raul Miller wrote: > All licenses have "reimplementation waste" issues, in some form or > another. Copyright law guarantees this.
At varying degrees; among free licenses, the GPL has some of the most severe, and that's completely by design. I don't like forcing people to waste their time reimplementing code I've written, so I don't tend to put my work under the GPL. I understand how copyleft ensures that you can reintegrate changes. It does this, very deliberately, at the cost of other rewriting due to forced license incompatibility. This is a tradeoff. It's a functional tradeoff, one which I'm not condemning at all; but it does have two sides. In exchange for its benefits, it also causes waste for people dealing with cases like Netatalk, with free but GPL-incompatible licenses. I don't think I've said anything new or strange about the GPL--it causes rewriting, it's designed to do so, and I think it's fair to acknowledge that. -- Glenn Maynard
