On Tue, 27 Feb 2007, Dan Armbrust wrote: > The fact that all of you have been arguing for this long over the GPL > goes a long way toward showing that the thing it to complicated for > anyone without a law degree to safely touch. I don't think the problem is that the GPL is hard to understand, I think the problem is that many people haven't tried to understand it. I found it very easy to understand. Also, we are mostly arguing about the relative benefits of GPL and BSDL, and there is a legitimate argument there even for people who know exactly what they are talking about (and even if they are lawyers). A person who is considering the GPL and needs a lawyer to understand it should consult a lawyer before rejecting the GPL as an option. > Also, you have left an important aspect out of all of the arguing over > what is better. What if your goal is to have standards? Sure -- that might be a good reason to choose BSDL instead of GPL. I think you are talking about software that implements a standard that you want to promote. If you want to give something away and you don't want to get anything back, and you don't mind competition from proprietary software, the BSDL is a good choice. In your case, it sounds like proprietary software wouldn't really be competition, but it would actually help you to promote your standard. That's great, so you chose not to use GPL and that was probably a good choice. > This allowed us to have interactions with companies such as IBM - they > provided a lot of support to us in debugging some issues on DB2 - > because they wanted to be able to use our code. Clarification: Did IBM say that they would not have been interested in your code if it had been released under the GPL? IBM has been very supportive of Linux (GPL), so I don't think that would kill their interest. > On a similar front - if the Open Office document specifications and > implementations were GPL, Microsoft could not ever (reasonably) provide > the ability to read or write those formats - even if a government body > tells them to. I don't know if specifications can be copyrighted, but specific implementations can be. I believe Microsoft developed their own version of ODF-like specification: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML > Which explains a lot of why ODF is released under LGPL rather than GPL. Do you have a reference on that? I can't find anything about a license for ODF. Are you sure you aren't thinking of a specific program that implements ODF? > If the ODF supporters can walk into a gov't body and tell them that > Microsoft can easily support writing to ODF from MSWord - all they have > to do it force them to make the business decision to do it - it's an > easy sell. If they have to tell them that Microsoft can't support ODF > unless they GPL all of MSWord - do you really think they are going to > get very far? I don't understand what you are talking about? Microsoft has dealt with this. I'm sure it wasn't a big deal. We don't need to give free code to Microsoft before they can accomplish a simple conversion to ODF. Microsoft doesn't want to support anyone's standards but their own and I don't think free availability of a code base is affecting their choices about ODF. > Apache and Eclipse are two very large and growing software ecosystems. > You know why? No GPL! Ton's of commercial companies use their > software! And many of those commercial companies have people that spend > time fixing bugs in that same software. Like me, for one. That is another peculiar and unsupportable claim. Why would you think that Apache is successful because it is not under the GPL? I think it is because Apache is a nice program. Many nice programs are distributed under the GPL and they are successful. > GPL is not about free. Its about an impossible to achieve pipe dream. That's a peculiar statement. Really, some of you guys say the craziest things. GPL (as compared to BSDL) is about encouraging people to help a project to grow. If I write some code, distribute it under the GPL, and someone sends me a patch or some additional code to be incorporated under the GPL, then it has succeeded and the GPL has made my dream come true. The GPL offers more encouragement for future development than does the BSDL. You might call it a "viral quality" of the GPL that the BSDL lacks. > It says that you are not entitled to payment, if you choose, for your > work. > There is, and always will be a place for commercial software. Irrelevant. > Declaring commercial software the enemy is not the solution. "the solution?" A commercial (proprietary!) product may be a competitor and if you want to call a competitor "the enemy," fine. Then proprietary software is the enemy. I don't know what it solves to say so, but that is true if you define "enemy" to include your competitors. > Quite simply, there are some applications that require massive amounts > of money to develop. Forbidding people from charging for the end result > does not help create more GPL code. It only makes the existing GPL code > that may have been useful, go completely unused. What requires "massive amounts of money to develop?" Can you give an example. I can't envision a software project that is not doable under the GPL. It might take more time, of course. Also, the fact that something is GPL doesn't mean it can't have massive amounts of money behind it. For example, governments can produce GPL software. I can write a grant to NIH and get hundreds of thousands of dollars to support software development. > How about tax software? When when do you suppose that the GPL is going > to end up providing us with a way to do our taxes? How about never. When will BSDL be providing this software? If it is never provided as FOSS, then proprietary programs are not competitors. I am not saying that there should be no proprietary software, but I am saying that I will always prefer a FOSS option, other things being equal (and they aren't equal so I go for FOSS before it's as good for me as proprietary, but I still use proprietary software every day). It would be possible for federal and state governments to provide tax software under GPL or compatible license. They might not do it because of the proprietary lobby, but it doesn't sound like a bad idea to me. > Do you know how much money it takes to write software to accurately do > taxes? The only way we would ever potentially have open source tooling > like this is if the gov't funded the development - and then - why would > the gov't use a GPL license? Commercial companies should have ever > right to build on top of the software as well - just because they want > to improve it doesn't mean that they should be forced to give away their > improvements. The un-improved code is still available to everyone, just > like before... That seems like a reasonable suggestion, actually. The government software would be produced by the government for use by others and there would be no requirement to make the code from resulting product available to the government. Sounds like a win-win. Of course, in this situation, the original developer is not trying to encourage contributions from a developer community. I would say that you had two good ideas sandwiched within a bunch of emotional baloney. Why can't we just make suggestions and explain now things work without resorting to extreme talk about "pipe dreams" and other unsupported (and probably unsupportable) claims? It is also good to admit to doubt when doubt exists because none of us are the top expert on these issues, nor are we expected to be. Again: When developing a FOSS program that you want to promote and where you would like to encourage a community of developers to contribute, I see no advantage for the BSDL over the GPL. I see the GPL as superior in that it encourages development and prohibits use of the code in a proprietary competitor. Therefore, I will always use the GPL in my work because I am always trying to encourage others to contribute. I am working on developing software for scientific uses (e.g., simulation of genetic data for research on methods of genetic analysis). Mike