At 5:17 PM -0500 12/3/00, mlw wrote:
>I honestly feel that it is wrong to take what others have shared and use
>it for the basis of something you will not share, and I can't understand
>how anyone could think differently.
Yeah, it really sucks when companies that are in buisness to make money by creating
solutions and support for end users take the hard work of volenteers, commit resources
to extending and enhancing that work, and make that work more accessable end users
(for a fee).
Maybe it's unfair that the people at the bottom of that chain don't reap a percentage
of the revenue generated at the top, but those people were free to read the license of
the product they were contributing to.
Ironically, the GPL protects the future income a programmer much bettter than the BSD
license, becuase under the GPL the original author can sell the code to a commercial
enterprise who otherwise would not have been able to use it. Even more ironically, the
GPL doesn't prevent 3rd parties from feeding at the trough as long as they DON'T
extend and enhance the product. (Though Red Hat and friends donate work back to
maintain community support.)
To me, Open Source is about admitting that the Computer Science field is in it's
infancy, and the complex systems we're building today are the fundamental building
blocks of tomorrow's systems. It is about exchanging control for adoption, a trade-off
that has millions of case studies.
Think Different,
-pmb
--
"Every time you provide an option, you're asking the user to make a decision.
That means they will have to think about something and decide about it.
It's not necessarily a bad thing, but, in general, you should always try to
minimize the number of decisions that people have to make."
http://joel.editthispage.com/stories/storyReader$51
