On Tue, 20 Jul 2010, Levi Pearson wrote: > Yes, but you can license your software to grant permission to use, copy, > modify, and redistribute it without preaching to people about rights and > freedoms and whatnot, and without forcing them to open any software they > might link with yours.
Yes, that's certainly an option. We should just remember that everyone whether they go out of their way to assert it or not denies the freedom to use, copy, modify, and redistribute anything they write unless they go out of their way to grant those permissions to others. So the GPL may seem draconian, but if you had to specifically claim all the "rights" that copyright law gives you, you'd sound pretty preachy and fussy about rights and whatnot. I think in light of the new default "everything is copyrighted by default" legal situation (only since 1976 in the U.S.) the GPL is still pretty friendly. In other words, I don't see the more liberal licenses such as BSD or MIT being on any higher moral ground, or freer, than the GPL. They just have different tradeoffs. Jon -- Jon Jensen End Point Corporation http://www.endpoint.com/ /* PLUG: http://plug.org, #utah on irc.freenode.net Unsubscribe: http://plug.org/mailman/options/plug Don't fear the penguin. */
