On 2011-04-14, Steve Clark <scl...@netwolves.com> wrote: > Look I was only responding to the person that wanted to use *BSD and > not have to make public enhancements, changes, etc, he or his > company<br> > made. That to me makes it seem he/them was/were only interested in > taking and not returning anything. <br>
It is quite possible to provide source code for most changes you make and hold back on some of them. Indeed GPL can be a real administrative hassle if you have some changes which upstream is not interested in taking, you have to maintain a local copy of any code you've supplied to others just in case one of them decides they want a copy of the source sometime in the future. Many people *do* feed code back even when they aren't required to, because to do otherwise often means redoing your work to fit in with changes made in upstream code. For any significant change this can be a huge amount of work, so there's no point in keeping something private unless it's either trivial or worth a lot. In any event, the GPL doesn't stop people from taking without returning anything. I would guess probably the majority of people who don't pay for their software give nothing back whatever the license. GPL doesn't force people to give anything back, it's just about making sure people who receive your binaries also get source code. Anyway you should wait for my brother, he's much bigger and much tastier... Trip trap, trip trap, off to munch the sweet grass the other side of the river. _______________________________________________ Soekris-tech mailing list Soekris-tech@lists.soekris.com http://lists.soekris.com/mailman/listinfo/soekris-tech
