Hi Robert,
> The justification I was given for this years ago is the F/OSS
> community hasn't _lost_ anything by this closing of code. The kind of
> company that is likely to produce closed code is going to avoid GPL
> and just re-implement. Possibly worse, they will just break the GPL
> guidelines.
They could either
⢠Write their own, avoiding FLOSS.
⢠Find FLOSS they can "close" and use, e.g. BSD.
⢠Take GPL and ignore licence, infringing copyright; this happens
quite a lot, e.g. Amstrad.
⢠Take GPL and comply with licence.
A lot get away with violating the GPL, but it is slowly improving and
some projects are very good at persuing infringers, e.g. busybox.
http://www.busybox.net/license.html
> What has happened though is the "whole world" has gained from that
> closed product using good OSS code. So we've gained better software
> and not lost anything.
You're giving a value to that closed product using good quality software
instead of poor quality, home-grown, software and are saying all the
others have no value ("lost anything"), concluding with X > 0. The
values of all them obviously differ depending on circumstances but zero
is unfair.
Apple write proprietary stuff for some things where they could have
taken FLOSS yet arguably some of what they give to the customer and the
world when doing this has more value because of the innovation involved.
> I'd prefer to see MS use a good networking stack than try to write
> their own. Fine it's a shame that they've allowed it to fester. I
> don't see what the F/OSS community lost and I do see what all Windows
> users gained.
FOSS may have lost fixes or improvements MS made, potentially fixes that
others hadn't spotted and had to spend duplicate time tracking down.
Users, e.g. companies, may have lost the potential to audit the code
themselves for flaws, to be able to investigate when there seems to be a
bug instead of the trail stopping where their source code ends, or to be
able to tweak and experiment when there's a performance bottleneck.
Can one cook up a scenario that's worse than MS not taking that FLOSS
network stack in the first place? Yes. Does that mean the existing
scenario is the best it could be? Not necessarily AFAICS.
Cheers,
Ralph.
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