On Mon, Jun 07, 1999 at 12:47:29PM -0300, David Maxwell wrote:

> > Maybe folks will someday realise that the ideas behind Open Source are
> > totally antithetical to capitalism and competition, a system which at
> > its essential core requires a disparity of knowledge that cannot be had
> > when you're sharing your "competitive tools."
> 
> Not true. Look at the hardware layer first, we all have the same options
> of 'tools' there. Anyone can buy a Pentium, or an Alpha, or whatever,
> not anyone can, say, port NetBSD to it.
> 
> Without standards in things like the IBM PC, Linux wouldn't be seeing the
> growth it is now. Standard hardware fosters development.

I'm not talking about standards being bad. I'm saying that folks are seeing
the chafe between competitive commercialism and the open source philosophy.
The idea of competitive commercialism is to be successful, and you end up
becoming successful by having that which your competitors lack. This does
not have good synergy with a philosophy that says that you should share
what you have out of the goodness of your heart to make the world a better
place.

> People can benefit from the sharing of standard tools, without giving up
> their advantages.

Right. But the advantages of the tools != the competitive advantage of having
good tools that you don't share with others, such that they're forced to use
less-good tools.

> Freedom is important, I find the GPL restrictive. That's _one_ of the reasons
> I like NetBSD :-)

I don't want to start a holy war that has no conclusion, so I'll state the
entirety of my opinion once, with the caveat that I have nothing more to add.

The GPL is only restrictive in that it does not allow one to take code into
a proprietary state. In some instances it makes it difficult to integrate
GPLed code with other code if that other code is not sufficiently "free" by
the GPL definition, with the blatant intent of fostering the growth of GPLed
code to the exclusion of proprietary code. I see no other interpretation and
I see no further restrictions. The intent of the GPL is 100% good, and its
implementation backs up its goals, IMHO.

The BSD and X licenses are just as good, IMHO, with the one exception being
that folks who wish to make the code proprietary may do so. I see little
value in this, personally. In every sense, BSD and X licensed code is just
as free as GPLed code once you have it - there's simply no guarantee that
you'll be able to get the code.

The argument I've seen is that GPLed floor-sweeper code would have to be made
available for three years, "and why should a vacuum cleaner company have to
distribute software?" My thought here is that if all code were GPLed, you'd
have a far better chance of spotting that Y2K bug in the software running
your kid's respirator after the car crash if you can get the code. (This
is obviously an extreme - extremist? - counter-argument, but it's an entirely
valid one.) Proprietary source code lacks significant peer review.

There. That's it. This is the last I'll talk about the GPL for quite some
time, publically or otherwise. I don't pretend to think that I can convince
anyone in here of the merits of the GPL; nor would I benefit greatly from
such a conversion, since we already use a sufficiently free license for our
stuff.

-- 
                           /\
     Mason Loring Bliss   /()\   mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us
 awake ? sleep : dream;  /    \  http://acheron.ne.mediaone.net