> 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