begin quoting John H. Robinson, IV as of Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 09:25:40AM -0700: > Stewart Stremler wrote: [snip] > > Assigning rights back to the owner lets you do this as well, but > > that is seen as objectionable to a lot of people these days. > > Presumably, because the author can turn into a moocher and take your > code you assigned over and turn into a proprietary license. I don't > trust even the FSF to not pull a stunt like that.
So if a rider were allowed -- say, "if you contribute code that is accepted, then so long as that code is in the product, you will have your existing license applied to the product" -- people would have much less of a problem? As I see it, we have two fears -- one, that the author will turn into a moocher, and two, the users will be nothing but moochers -- but only one seems to be addressed at a time. So long as I know that I'm assigning my improvements back to the original author when I send them to 'em, I actually have no problem with this "mooching"... if I were concerned, I wouldn't send in any changes. (It's not like anyone ever uses 'em anyway.) When the author/vendor makes it easy to provide feedback, ideas, bug reports, and improvements -- and then acknowledges your contribution -- it's a joy to do so, even if you give up your "rights". When they make it difficult, and then disregard your contribution, it's hard to justify the effort, even if it's "more free". (One of the reasons I want competition is that it provokes the customer-oriented attitude. When you're the only player, arrogance is well-nigh unavoidable; when your users have a choice to go elsewhere with relatively little pain, you play a lot nicer.) > > If everyone were college students, it would be grand. > > Just what we need, more code written by drunken grad students. This does seem to be my impression of a lot of code lately. But then, I loathe #ifdefs in code. I'm just funny that way. > During the million-dollar BIND 9 rewrite, Paul Vixie characterized > the original BIND code as ``sleazeware produced in a drunken fury by > a bunch of U C Berkeley grad students.'' "It's not what it does that's amazing, it's that it does anything at all!" -Stewart "What seemed so brilliant last night is less so in today." Stremler
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