On Mon, Jun 07, 1999 at 01:09:15PM -0400, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

> I completely disagree, on two grounds.

Heh. Okay. I've given this lots of time to percolate, so now I'll respond.

> 1) I do not share code out of the goodness of my heart or out of a
> desire to help mankind. I share because I get something out of sharing
> -- personal satisfaction and, at times wider use of my code (which is
> often valuable to me). Were I not enjoying what I was doing, I would
> not do it, even if I felt the activity was of benefit to our species
> as a whole.

But, this doesn't speak to your sharing source code. You could do the same
with binaries. You could even distribute binaries and/or source, with strict
language prohibiting modification or at least the distribution of modified
code or binaries derived from such code. You'd still have your code out there,
and you'd still have the satisfaction of knowing that people like it enough
to use it. But you've chosen a licensing scheme that allows folks to take
your code and modify it freely. That seems fairly altruistic, when you could
instead use licensing force people into paying you to develop modifications.

> 2) It is known that you can make money in the Open Source world. You
> just make it off of things other than selling software itself -- such
> as the selling of services.

Right. But the selling of services doesn't require open source code. If
Cygnus were supporting lots of little proprietary environments, they wouldn't
be able to amass half as much skill or knowledge, I think. It's the case,
I believe, that Cygnus exists because of rabidly open code. If gcc weren't
GPLed, I bet Cygnus wouldn't exist.

I think the largest difference between our viewpoints is that of who we're
seeing as participants. I believe that individuals will tend to see the
merits of sharing and do so willingly, thus making the BSD license completely
sufficient. However, I believe that corporations or groups of people together
lose their objectivity and require the stick that's provided with the GPL.
Yes, it's paternalistic, exactly as you stated it, but I don't believe that
corporations do or even can learn in the same way an individual learns. The
motive is profit.

> Empirical economic and other studies have shown that the naive
> assumption (that cooperation is not to the benefit of a competing
> organism) is not true. A winning strategy for the individual organism
> competing with others is a combination of non-cooperative and
> cooperative behaviors.

This is a winning long-term strategy. How many corporations are so enlightened
as to think in the long term?

Some of our most successful and well-known companies make huge profits by
doing things that involve chopping down ancient timberland and rainforests
and the like. Almost all companies I can think of waste resources in a fairly
serious way - electricity, paper, plastic, etc. This is not long-term thinking.
It's difficult for me to understand how companies that work with software are
fundamentally different from other companies in this respect. You're seemingly
imbuing our corporations with more sense than is due them, I believe.

> However, I have been protected from dealing with the utter annoyance of
> preserving every version of my code I ever release and dealing with people
> calling up requesting it until the end of time.

The GPL does address this with its three-year limit. After that's up, you're
no longer obligated to distribute source. Also, like you said, your customers
probably don't care. The chance that you're going to have to send out source
is fairly minimal. And if you do have to send out your source, you can charge
to cover your media and time copying and sending the package. From the GPL
itself:

= Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give
= any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing
= source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding
= source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on
= a medium customarily used for software interchange;

> The BSD license has lots of other advantages as well. It makes it
> clear that I can pretty much do what I like with the code.

The complexity of the GPL is certainly not ideal. I prefer the simplicity
and clarity of the BSD license.

I suppose the ideal solution would be to have an enlightened populace and a
corporate world that thinks in the long term. Of course, in such a utopia
even the BSD license wouldn't be required - folks wouldn't need to be forced
to keep a copyright intact - they'd simply transfer authoring credit because
it's the right thing to do Also, no one would dream of acting in any way that
would make the liability disclaimer seem necessary. <shrug>

Both licenses are acceptable to me. Happily, they're both available to me for
my use. I can use either, as appropriate to the situation.

Anyway, thanks for the letter. My perspective has once again broadened as a
consequence of it.

-- 
    Mason Loring Bliss  mason@acheron.middleboro.ma.us  They also surf who
awake ? sleep : dream;  http://acheron.ne.mediaone.net  only stand on waves.