On Wednesday 05 Jan 2011, Kenneth Gonsalves wrote: > so the purpose of GPL is to prevent people from making proprietary > clones? I totally fail to understand the rationale behind this. If I > have a plot of land, and someone encroaches on it - then I no longer > have the land, unless I evict him. But software? Even if someone > takes a copy and makes it closed - I still have my copy. So what do > I lose? Software is not a commodity that can be bought and sold. > Whether I give my software to someone, or sell it - I still have it > on my repo, on my hard disk, on forks and on my backup. Why should I > worry about it?
Because you want the benefits of other peoples' changes to your software to reach everyone? If I write a free utility to calculate PI up to a million digits, and someone else modifies it to calculate it up to a billion digits, I would want that modified utility and the enhanced techniques it uses to also be available for free. In other words, I don't want Apple to take my shiny new McDonalds finder program and make it into a sexy proprietary application which only registered Apple users can download for a fee. You may agree or disagree with that viewpoint but you cannot question its validity. Regards, -- Raj -- Raj Mathur [email protected] http://kandalaya.org/ GPG: 78D4 FC67 367F 40E2 0DD5 0FEF C968 D0EF CC68 D17F PsyTrance & Chill: http://schizoid.in/ || It is the mind that moves -- http://mm.glug-bom.org/mailman/listinfo/linuxers
