On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 1:27 PM, Brian Wood <woodbrian77 at gmail.com> wrote: > Robert Nesius: > > Anyway - the GPL. It does world good, because it keeps people's > > contributions in the public domain. > > When the US helped defeat Nazi Germany, anyone who shared > the country's secrets was a traitor. Keeping some things secret > from Germany and Japan helped us to defeat some countries that > would have destroyed us if they could have. Does "world good" > have anything to do with being a decent person? > Well, I was coming at this from a "commons" point of view, where people give back to that which benefits them. > > Now take a step back and look at the > > number of people who have contributed hours upon hours of effort to the > > public domain via the GPL for no economic gain and ask yourself "Why > would > > they do that?" (Because they're stupid communists! HA! :) ). > > Some of them have been naive and haven't been rewarded much > for their efforts. Others have taken advantage of that and made > a lot off of the generosity of some well-meaning people. > I would say most haven't been rewarded for their efforts when it's all said and done. At least not in terms of money. But many were rewarded in terms of noosphere credibility, admiration of peers, and by the knowledge their work would not be available to be used by others and not hi-jacked thanks to the GPL. Not that all FOSS developers are as concerned about that. i.e., BSD and Apache licenses are very permissive with respect to appropriation for commercial use I believe. -Rob -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <http://mailman.mn-linux.org/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20111017/8fb8f06a/attachment.html>