[cad-linux] Re: open vs closed

> The following was supposedly scribed by
> Thomas Schmidt
> on Wednesday 11 February 2004 09:47 am:

>Yeah, me too doesn't want to sound like a prick, but I also do not get
> excited about yet one more whoever taking my last five years work to make
> money.
>
>Just my $.02
>
>> Not to sound like a prick but it's hard for me to get
>> excited about yet one more player on the CAD field
>> that presents me with a EULA and doesn't mention the
>> GPL.

Okay, so now you both sound like pricks and everybody is happy:)

The GPL protects you from people *taking* your code.  Basically, if you are 
going to use a bunch of code, you are likely going to make improvements to 
it.  If someone gets your code, improves it and wants to redistribute it, the 
GPL allows this so long as they make the source available.

As far as someone installing and using your software as a business, that is 
what support contracts are for.  Have a mailing list for the bumbling college 
kids and bill yourself out as a consultant to the bumbling businesses, who 
are in a fine position to pay for training and support.

I can't tell you that you have to make your code GPL, and I don't really care.  
What I think is really important is that there are plenty of cad and 
engineering software, both gpl and commercial, but they all essentially 
function in their isolated world.

I'm not talking about import and export.  I'm talking about *communication*.  
Show me an app that can communicate with another, and then I'll start to 
think about getting excited.  Tell me that it can communicate with any app 
which conforms to an open and freely available standard (including the one 
that I'm going to write in the next 10 minutes) and I'd actually be excited.  
Hell, I might even quit working on software and go back to engineering if 
there were tools available which were any more than bloated scratchpad mated 
to bloated calculators.

What does the GPL have to do with this?  Really very little, except that we 
(cad users and engineers) are currently mired in an environment of 
proprietary vendors trying (and succeeding) to leverage lock-in strategies to 
become the one-true-way, and we are beginning to distrust them (actually, I'm 
well past beginning and quite far down the road to conspiracy-theorist.)  On 
top of that, we're working under managers which don't understand computers, 
but believe that one engineer with a computer can do the work of 5.  
Meanwhile, we are all trying to push the limits of material and design 
technology to create something new and different, but we don't have the tools 
to do it, and I think most of us forget that there are ultimately lives at 
stake.

--Eric
-- 
"Unthinking respect for authority is the greatest enemy of truth."
                                        --Albert Einstein

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