November 08, 2005

More licensing thoughts...

I still have mixed thoughts about the whole thing. There are times when I find the copyleft licenses (GPL, LGPL, and MPL) reasonable and enticing (who wants to give their code away to a competitor?), but at the same time those licenses become the competitor and decide what even the original developer can do with the code.

The statement that sums up the Free Software Foundations "copyleft" thinking (and the part of all this that concerns me) is, "Proprietary software developers have the advantage of money; free software developers need to make advantages for each other." [1] I see the point, but that way of thinking creates a very distinct "us vs. them" atmosphere that I think licenses like the Apache License avoid.

Just more musings.

[1] Quote found in "To LGPL or not to LGPL."

Posted by TheIdeaMan at November 8, 2005 08:33 PM | TrackBack
Comments

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY DEAR BE-ENNN
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO BEN

Posted by: joy at November 9, 2005 02:11 PM

i second that song, done more beautifully by joy than i could hope to. happy birthday.

Posted by: david at November 9, 2005 03:07 PM

Aw, you guys.... [[blush]]

Posted by: Benjamin at November 9, 2005 03:48 PM

comment

Posted by: tester at December 7, 2005 12:42 AM
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