GPL is forced socialism
"Economies and nations need intellectual property (IP) to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. I've talked to developing nations, representatives from academia and manufacturing companies that had begun to incorporate GPL software into their products, then…found they had an obligation to deliver their IP back into the world," Schwartz said.
The GPL purports to have freedom at its core, but it imposes on its users "a rather predatory obligation to disgorge all their IP back to the wealthiest nation in the world," the United States, where the GPL originated, Schwartz said. "If you look at the difference between the license we elected to use and GPL, there are no obligations to economies or universities or manufacturers that take the source code and embed it in (their own) code."
Source: News.Com
The most obnoxious portion of GPL is:
But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based
on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of
this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the
entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.
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April 6th, 2005 at 9:23 pm
These objections to open source are clueless. It says nowhere in the GNU GPL that you must give away your source code _for free_ to _everyone_. The GPL merely makes your _customers_ eligible to _ask_ for your source code.
April 6th, 2005 at 9:26 pm
I should add that many a nerd thinks the GPL is better than BSD at protecting his work from predatory behaviors. But this is nonsense. It is perfectly legal to me to sell GPL software that someone else produces. Just as long as you distribute the code when your customer asks for it. Whereas typically, the latter will not. And when he does, his incentive to keep it secret will reach biblical proportions.
April 6th, 2005 at 10:17 pm
I think what you’re looking for is horses for courses.
If I was writing a new piece of technology and I wanted to improve the world - I’d use the BSD license (as with, say, TCP/IP). In fact, any technology I wanted as a standard, I would go with the BSD license.
If I was writing a useful library that I wanted widely used, I’d use the MPL/LGPL - it seems like a nice fair license - if you make a change to my code (such as say, a bugfix, or a minor enhancement), you have to distribute that, but your application is your own.
Finally, if I’m writing a proper application, then I’d probably GPL it - because I wouldn’t want a company selling me something that was 80% my work. It very much depends on your point of view - I agree that if the GPLd software represents 20% of y our work, then it feels unfair - but consider the opposite - what if (allegedly like CherryOS), the GPL’d work makes up 90%+ of your work. If you were the original developer, wouldn’t you be miffed if you didn’t get back bug enhancements etc?
Also, finally, consider I’d quite like to modify F# to perhaps target Java - but despite the source availability, I don’t think Microsoft would be too keen on this, and I probably couldn’t do it. I almost certainly couldn’t sell the result. This is the same.
April 7th, 2005 at 12:12 am
Blah! Your arguments don’t add up. First you say that GPL is harmful because it enforces the developer to release their work under GPL too. Then you start blabling about how it is bad to not get paid for your work and how it is bad for you that others utilize your work. Well, it seems that there ARE people out there who do will work for free in some part of their free time.
So if you don’t like it, then don’t use GPL and GPL’d sources. You don’t loose anything, you just don’t get that stuff for free. You’ll have to do it yourself (and you won’t be able to utilize others’ work for your own wealth, which is good according to your oppinion). If you see a lot of competition in GPL’d software then it seems that quite a number of people are willing to work cheeper than you. But that’s free market, buddy.
Your words are quite hypocritical - your only problem is that you can’t use others’ work for getting more money without paying for them. I do work for a large corporation and we do use some free non-GPL libraries (sometimes even GPL’d ones for internal projects) and I do develop a small GPL’d opensource application. I wouldn’t like my employer to take that and sell it because I’ve done it in my spare time. Think about it as social work or a donation to the society.