Paul Surgeon wrote:
On Wednesday, 19 January 2005 23:28, David Megginson wrote:
As I mentioned before, I also think that the user community will vote
for the open source models with its feet (or, I guess, mice) and tend
to stomp out others with social pressure or at least apathy.
There is still place for non-GPL addons.
There are guys who code addons for flightsimulators for a living and will not release their products under GPL otherwise someone can just copy it as much as they like and they don't get a cent in return.
Sure GPL can work in some scenarios but if your market is 1000 copies and you charge $50 for your product you can't possibly afford to license your work as GPL and expect to keep food on the table for your kids to eat.
It takes months of work with a team of 5 or 6 people to create one top notch aircraft like what Phoenix Software Simulations put out.
GPL is not the "be all" and "end all" when it comes to software licensing although it is a nice license.
Interestingly, this thread started out as a debate over linking or not linking to external aircraft sites which might distribute "non-free" aircraft.
I take a view that is similar to Debian. For the core FG distribution, everything needs to be GPL compatible. But recognizing that some people might prefer to release/distribute their work under other licensing terms (which they have every freedom to do) I have no problem linking to those sites. Are we to remove all links to all sites that aren't fully 100% gpl compatible?
Oh, and please, those who need to eat or feed their kids, please continue to do so. :-)
Curt. --
Curtis Olson http://www.flightgear.org/~curt HumanFIRST Program http://www.humanfirst.umn.edu/ FlightGear Project http://www.flightgear.org Unique text: 2f585eeea02e2c79d7b1d8c4963bae2d
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