On Sat, Jun 05, 2004, Ken Foskey wrote: > Is the use of FOSS code in applications that are closed a huge evil or > do we want to propagate the use of FOSS code.
This is one of those trick questions isn't it? If I answer "the use of FOSS code in applications that are closed a huge evil" then I'm saying I don't "want to propagate the use of FOSS code" right? I'm still not willing to deal in such loaded terms. There are several other alternatives in any case: - wanting to increase the amount of FOSS code in the world (not unrelated to *use* of code, but not exactly the same) - wanting to increase the visibility of FOSS code in the world - wanting to strengthen FOSS *projects* - wanting to make software available to people in the third world etc etc. Various licences and community structures do these in various ways. Besides, I don't think it's monolithic. In some cases the use of FOSS code in closed applications may be a bad thing for various people (closed source program outcompetes original open source program, programmer misses out on compensation because closed source developers did not feel the need to buy a second licence, open source program misses out on patches because closed source project didn't contribute them back) and other times a good thing (closed source project increases visibility of open source library, closed source project contributes to open source library...) At this stage, copyright holder makes the call. *All* open source licences give away rights that are restricted by default. > The other approach is the GPL approach that says that in order to > strengthen GPL you must create GPL libraries and place a burden on the > commercial programmer to choose between GPL or rewriting the > functionality. On the other hand, it is a guarentee to the user that "anyone who makes a newer bigger better version of this using my hard work will also GPL it! And so will people who make a bigger better version of something else entirely, but use my code!" I'm not that strongly pro-GPL, but I think it has positives as well as negatives. -Mary -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
