Charles C. Bennett, Jr. writes:
>Remember - the GPL is here to protect *you* from having commercial
>interests poaching on your labor without you getting anything in
>return.
Well, yes, but only credit, not any monetary reward. As I read it,
the GPL ensures the user gets the benefits of open source software.
Suppose you spot an anomaly in the "sort" facility in some app (say,
your mail user agent). If it calls GNU sort, then you can dig into
the source, find the problem, fix it, and mail the fix to the code
maintainer. Or (more likely) upgrade to the newest version and get
the fix somebody else contributed.
"Karl J. Runge" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> 1) How "helpful" can I (a proprietary program distributor) be in getting
> the "arbitrary GPL'd program" (that my proprietary program needs to
> function) to the end-user?
...
> 2) If a sys-admin downloads software and sets things up so the 2000
> employees at the company can use it, is that "distribution"?
>
> If he does this (say simultaneously) for "my proprietary program" +
> "the arbitrary GPL'd program it needs" is there a problem? Are there
> other sorts of problems with this sort of "sysadmin distribution"
I can't see any problems here, provided the sources go along with the
executables (or are "made available"). It's still possible for a user
to investigate/fix/upgrade the GPL'd program.
You, a proprietary program distributor with "commercial interests",
would be benefiting from contributions to the GPL'd program without
providing any rewards to the programmers making those contributions.
That's not a violation of the GPL. The Debian Free Software
Guidelines make this explicit: software licenses that don't allow
sales fail. Among other things, they would keep CDROM publishers from
making and selling Debian CDROMs.
I think the GPL provides two big advantages to a programmer: It
ensures he continues to get credit (not monetary, but a reward
nonetheless) for his work. Also, it protects a large and growing body
of code that we will continue to have the right to use. People can
try to patent algorithms, but "prior art" is a lot easier to prove if
source code has been widely distributed.
- Jim Van Zandt
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