On Jan 19, 2006, at 1:20 PM, Post, Mark K wrote:
This guy (and his writings and his company) came up on an internal mailing list a while back, with people complaining about how he was bashing the GPL, etc. My reply then, and now, was that when you take into account his audience (companies that want to use an embedded OS in an appliance, and who don't want to make their own source code public) he's absolutely right. The BSD style licenses are much more business friendly than the GPL. I read the entire white paper. I found it to be biased, certainly, towards the concerns of embedded appliance manufacturers and sellers, but other than that, pretty much correct. His advice was pretty much right on as well.
Yeah, but the context, at least as presented, *wasn't* appliance manufacturers. It seemed, to me, pretty clearly designed to scare people off of USING (not MAKING) GPL-licensed products. I don't think the GPL is generally too appropriate for commercial products. You'll notice that most of the stuff on the SNA website is Artistic License, and we do some BSDish things too. That doesn't mean we don't use plenty of GPL products in our day-to-day activity, and it doesn't mean that I hesitate to recommend them to customers for whom I think they're the right solution. Even for manufacturers, the appropriate advice is "be aware of the implications of the license you choose for your product, and don't choose GPL unless you can live with the consequences. And if the only thing that provides what you need as infrastructure for your product is GPL, then maybe you need to rethink your approach, if you can't live with its being GPLed." Cygwin is my current "favorite" example of that. It's certainly the EASIEST way to do a straight-up port of something Linux-y to Windows...but it DOES impose some pretty ugly restrictions on your product, if you link against Cygwin1.dll. Adam ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For LINUX-390 subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the message: INFO LINUX-390 or visit http://www.marist.edu/htbin/wlvindex?LINUX-390
