On 11-02-01 09:21 AM, strk wrote:
On Tue, Feb 01, 2011 at 07:04:44AM -0600, Patrick Cannon wrote:
The GPL is a virus license, if you really wanted the code to be "free" it
would be released under an MIT style license. The GPL/LGPL is just another
proprietary license scheme that is meant to prevent people from using the
code in any commercial venture. Which is OK if you are a government agency
or a school.
I don't get this.
What prevents you from talking with the copyright holder of a GPL/LGPL
licenced software the same way you'd talk with the copyright holder of
a proprietary licensed software ?
Unfortunately, due to the collaborative nature of open source software,
there is not always (and actually very rarely) a single copyright holder
to talk to in order to request a license change or exception. Take for
instance GRASS and QGIS: who should one talk to?
I speak from experience: I had to refrain from using QGIS in a
(closed-source) project for a client not long ago because of its GPL
license. If there had been a single copyright holder I'd have talked to
that person instead of starting from scratch, but with multiple
copyright holders that simply made QGIS a no-go and the QGIS project as
a whole lost some potential users and contributors.
--
Daniel Morissette
http://www.mapgears.com/
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