ESR seems to be talk only about people who have been deterred by the
viral condition. But there might be developers who have opted to make
their src open because they needed to use GPL'd pieces in their
code...fine, agreed that they might not have done it wholeheartedly,
but still...it does leverage foss...after all, not everyone involved,
(like many companies), support foss for the sake of RMS...there are
financial motives as well, but I guess it is more of a symbiosis...
Vamsee, Arvind: I really don't know what a definition of Open Source
would be. I support the objectives as stated by RMS. I guess all this
movement is to give freedom to users, more than to developers. While a
BSD'ish licence will give the developer a choice between whether to
disclose his source or not, the user's rights to modify and use the
program the way he/she likes are not preserved. It takes a GPL to do
this. On a stronger note, how on earth is it ethical for a developer
to claim IP over code whose sizeable portion is not his/her own, and
is available freely. The baseline is, FOSS has revolved around 'You
take something from the community, you give back your best to the
same'. If you are selfish enough to think that you can siphon off
resources, never to give anything back to the community, this isn't
the place for you. IMHO, it really isn't an argument of whether FOSS
needs to be protected or otherwise. Even if the world, as we hope, has
only free software, I would still like GPL to be there around.
As a parting note, regarding what 'Open Source' really means, RMS in
the recent IIT talk said that he supports free software, not open
source. Anyone has ideas on what he really meant ?
it moves on...
--
The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck
is probably the day they start making vacuum cleaners.
-Ernst Jan Plugge
