Andrew Lentvorski wrote: > Once that happens, the GPL takes force. This has nothing to do with > "accidental" inclusions. This has to do with boxing yourself into a > corner which you can't get out of or which will require lots of work.
Right, that all sounds reasonable. > And what happens if a GPL library is the cornerstone of that code? The This question doesn't make sense if it isn't about "accidental" inclusions. If a GPL library happens to be the cornerstone of the code then you have already made a conscious decision to keep it all in hour forever or to release the code when you distribute it outside. > GPL works well for code which has a potentially large starting user > base. BSD works much better if the user base is small and needs to be > nurtured. If Berkeley had adopted the GPL for SPICE2, the small user > base would never have coalesced into a coherent whole. It would have > retarded the growth of VLSI for years. The fact that SPICE2 was a BSD > license meant that an entire industry of circuit simulators appeared > almost overnight. Berkeley may not have gotten much for it (and I > disagree, but that's for another day), but the entire economy and an > entire industry benefited to a huge degree. For the BSD license to have made such a big difference are we to assume that many companies are making changes to SPICE2 and distributing SPICE2 binaries outside of the company without releasing the source? What does this have to do with the SPICE2 user base coalescing into a whole? Sounds more like incompatible forking. -- Tracy R Reed http://copilotconsulting.com 1-877-MY-COPILOT -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
